--James---
The days following the night of partying felt short. It didn’t take much preparation to be ready – James left slightly before the last tingling signs of the death penalty were gone.
He had started to feel stifled and had regained most of his strength and so it was time to move on. All there was too it.
There was one lingering hit that hadn’t returned. The monstrous jumping stats were the most obvious but presumably his other mutation stats as well. It felt like…it felt like those stats had been damaged when he got revived and unlike the system given stats they hadn’t been returned or healed.
Incredibly sad, it was yet another reminder that the only guarantee was stuff the system had given. System stats? Returned on death. System skills? Returned on death. Anything else? Good luck. Those stats had also felt more important than the rest because they felt like he had earned them himself…but there were still remnants left behind and it wasn’t a huge hit to his totals.
James started off his journey differently this time. Once he was around 10 minutes away from the city, he started looking about and found a large dry log.
Rearranging his new backpack of spices and a frying pan, James picked up the log and made a promise to himself.
He wouldn’t drop this until he reached the badlands once more.
An additional punishment for failing. A way of making the relatively easy trip harder and more fun.
And so he set off, taking a break every few hours to rest his sore shoulders and re-adjust.
The first night fell and James could have dropped his massive, cumbersome weight…but instead, he held on.
This was now his weapon.
It wasn’t a good weapon – despite its size and weight it was difficult to swing hard enough to ‘count’…but it was ‘a’ weapon and James bludgeoned several chimeric creatures of the night before taking a nap. Several similar days passed, and James grew with dozens of achievements – all leaning towards strength stats. One or two to start and then, as if realizing his commitment, a shower of them all about the second day. Achievements for carrying a log for a long distance. Achievements for not letting go of the same log for an entire day. Achievements for using a log as a weapon or for throwing it into the mouth of a devouring tundra mole. There were a few close shaves that nearly made him drop his log – but he held on. After all, if he couldn’t handle this much, how could he cross the badlands?
Finally, after a much longer amount of time than his first run, James reached those planes yet again.
This time he gave the death field in front of him more respect – he was still excited, but a calm wave of focus passed over him.
Dropping his log, then lowering himself and using the trunk as a backrest, James rested while watching the planes from outside. He would cross in the morning – hopefully a full day would be enough to cross in the safety of daylight.
…
The morning of his trip, he awoke and stretched, carefully scanning the horizon from left to right.
In the distance, hulking shapes moved blurry and indistinct. The air was warped by some of the biomes in front of him – it was hard to tell just how far he had to cross.
One of the major landmarks was what looked like a giant upside-down pyramid floating at least three or four kilometers away – peaking up above the metallic grass directly in front of him and boxed in by what looked like incredibly tall and thin trees. James bounced a few times to hype himself up and then began to jog lightly forwards – trying his hardest to stay silent while still moving quickly.
The grass felt normal – surprisingly soft for something that looked spiky. What looked like tumbleweeds made out of steel wool seemed to stir and lazily bounce towards him, but he was soon past the area.
It was a fine line to walk. Partway between sneaking and running the trip continued. An attack by a seven-headed wolf-like creature. An attack by a cloud of bugs. An attack by a fast-moving snail-like creature with impenetrable armour and a slimy attack that melted through anything it touched.
James ran and hid and ran again feeling everything in intense detail. He could feel vibrations through the enhanced senses in his legs. Could see better with the stats in his eyes. Could run faster than the fastest athlete and [haste] himself to the speed of a car to get past sections or run around biomes that looked too hostile to cross.
Many attacks got through and piled up, but nothing hit a critical system and James was long past caring about the minor pain his body warned about.
It took almost seven hours to cross the badlands, but he did it. Bruised and scraped but entirely alive, James made it through without dying and was rewarded handsomely for his efforts, his 'quest' finally complete its reward true.
☠️ Achievement get: A brave crossing (Rare)
Description: Completely cross the badlands alone, without tools or external aid. Was it simply luck or truly skill that let you survive?
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Stat: +54 free body power stats.
Stat: +27 free body speed stats.
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---Maddy---
Maddy told her friends of the challenge she had been issued and the danger this second dungeon held. Agreeing it seemed like a good goal to work towards, they waited out the death penalty and prepared.
Maddy missed her scythe terribly as she recreated all her spells. This time she opted for turning her clothing into her focus – it seemed like the meta others were following and made sense. Buying a purple cloak and some red thread, Maddy sewed all her old spells into the inside of it. She then added most of the modifications she had done using her voice previously going through the motions.
It…didn’t feel as good – this wasn’t her path as some might say – and yet…she had to try it out at least once. Besides the time and effort, theoretically the only difference between this cloak and her staff had been the nice sort of theme that had gone into it. The wood staff was her life, the sharp blade was her death.
That theme had become less of a description once she had gained life and dark mana…but it had fit quite a bit more than this cloak did.
There was a single reason to go for an external focus instead of simply tattooing everything she wanted onto herself. Permanency. Tattoos were a commitment. It was another reason she liked her scythe better than this cloak – it was hard to remove the spells she sewed into this fabric when with her scythe she could simply smooth over sections with life mana and the wood would reset. She could experiment or alter her spells if she found something better.
Maddy really did miss her scythe, but couldn’t see a way of getting it back.
She had to move on.
For now, this cloak was fine. Even if it made all her spells feel worse and weaker and even if she found herself constantly comparing it to what she had.
Once they had prepared and dealt with the penalty the group began to practice using the easier dungeon.
Easy of course was not technically the right word for it once they got deep enough – the last few floors were technically full of monsters with more stats than them…it was still a dungeon with everything trying to kill them.
The difficulty came in how incredibly forgiving and artificially designed the dungeon was.
Starting at tier 0 and working its way up to rank 2 tier 2 by the end, this dungeon had the smoothest difficulty curve they had experienced so far. Each of the 9 floors were almost a copy of the previous one with small changes to each floor that stayed for subsequent floors. A river that appeared on floor 3 and was there every floor after that. A hallway that became a mirror maze on the 5th floor and remained after that point. The encounters changed as well – one enemy would become two or three on the next floor or evolve into a stronger variant each time but with a similar location and manner of attack.
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The concepts contained were ones of glass and water and reflections. Minor notes of light were strewn about but not in a way that mattered – the most light was used to attack with, was a glowing beetle that tried to blind them before striking. There wasn’t anything with illusions or lasers or similar. ‘Light mana’ but no ‘light concepts’ you might say.
Most of the monsters were giant clear bugs – dragon flies and water striders and various giant glass beetles. Many had some sort of reflective ability – a concept of reflection that when used in a certain way, let them shoot attacks back at the group. It was an incredibly strong reflection but not an invincible one.
Troy very quickly figured out how to twist his own magic and similar concept into piercing those mirrors – and Maddy’s attacks usually went around and attacked from all sides causing them to shatter easily enough. There were enough cracks in the defenses to exploit if she worked for it and the reflections didn’t seem able to follow the conceptual link of sound Maddy was using to attack through.
They overwhelmed the lower floors in strength then slowly solidified the best types of attacks when they could no longer simply crush the creatures.
The group took this dungeon slow – even though it was a smooth difficulty curve and let them practice on each enemy before it increased the difficulty, they still left and came back multiple days in a row.
They found which monster parts were worth harvesting raking up a solid slush fund and in a more exciting manner were pushed enough on the last two floors to gain skills on them. Maddy received a skill called ‘light shield’ on floor 8. It was a light and dark mana skill that created a perfect shield of light and for light. By that it made a black shield shaped disc that stopped all light – or light-based – attacks from passing through it…while only blocking a small section of space and allowing all other types of attacks to pass through.
That broke into the concept of polarity and a pseudo/limited concept of shielding. Stretching the skill to wrap around the group in a black bubble using the concept of an orb was easy enough – 360 defenses against light and only light at the cost of not being able to see out of the wall of darkness.
As fun of a personal spell as that was, its real use was in synergy with Jess’s skills.
A few hours of dedicated experimentation and Maddy could instantly coat all of Jess’s created shields in a thin film that added the light defense onto them. [Apply [Light Polarity shield] to shield touched by my sound] was the base of the spell, along with some modifiers for different scenarios. For the most part visually, it gave the transparent yellow panes of Jess’s barriers a dark tinted sheen like that of sunglasses. Its main use was blocking all light damage while continuing to function as a shield – not that it was really a game changer in this dungeon, but they did start using it every time they got to the glow beetles trivializing their attempt to blind them.
After coming back on the next day and fighting all the way through the 9th floor they had been rewarded yet again. Technically it had been a hard fight through to the final boss but days of practice against similar enemies made it feel like it was impossible for them to fail.
They moved like clockwork. Jess employed solid barriers that were weaker but withstood several attacks or situationally invincible barriers that blocked single attacks no matter how strong but shattered on a single hit. Troy settled into his DPS role with arrows that could bounce off stone or drill through chitin. Maddy dealt with a wave that appeared halfway through each floor and blinded a specific monster that was reliant on sight.
The final boss actually did have a light-based attack – a giant searing beam of blue light…
But light defense on Jess’s shields made that attack barely worth mentioning.
By several metrics the giant moth was technically stronger than the group…and yet it fell in less than ten minutes with none of them being hit once. The grub shaped boss on the 8th floor had actually been harder to beat than the moth on the ninth.
It truly was an ‘Easy’ dungeon where only the incompetent could die.
There was a long pause after they beat the creature – as if the system was watching and didn’t want to give them real rewards after such an easy fight. Finally it acquiesced and gave them the most low effort clear pane they had seen.
Finally, after almost thirty seconds they received their clear rewards, the lowered stats proving they hadn’t done something truly special.
A few more runs to try and regain as much of what was lost as possible and then they were going to hit the abandoned dungeon.
You needed a bit of danger to advance after all.
Fully cleared a dungeon after almost nine separate runs.
A smart plan with proper use of tactics.
Stat: +9 Mental planning power
Main reward
Concept of {Separating Delineation}.
Draw a line upon the world, compartmentalizing reality as you see fit.
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---Richard---
Richard had been derailed a few times leading to his goals ballooning.
His one goal hadn’t changed – his wish to have fun at the cost of everything else – but the list of potential things he could try was massive.
The things he wanted were endless. The fields he could get into, the things he could do.
The problem of course was money. They’d gotten some quick credits from their last dungeon delve and those were now gone a good part of that due to them not knowing to harvest shit while they were there.
The second inhibitor was number of slots. Frankly he was greedy for slots – he only had one free right now. One free slot held up by his AI or an item or a self-grown skill. Not enough to really dip into his whole skillet.
Both problems were solved by delving again – but delving what he had already delved alone this time seemed fucking dull.
Besides, the most consistent way of gaining a skill was completing a dungeon for the first time and there was a second option around his level in this city. The swamp dungeon.
What are you doing in my swamp!
Richard giggled to himself while strolling into the place mostly unarmed. Two quick runs. First a quick stroll to pick some stuff. His goal was enough credits to buy a weapon. Then he could do a proper speedrun.
“I wonder if they sell music players. I want to stick a boombox to my gun and blast some high-octane junk as a background track. Something electronic I can shoot to the beat too. Make this a rhythm game–“
What looked like a cross between a crocodile and a slug surged out of the muddy water Richard was wading through. Faster than he could react, it twisted its body sideways through the air – bending like no crocodile could – and chomped around his entire waist and core.
The teeth dug into Richard’s flesh and a thick saliva burned as it attempted to melt through his flesh.
Ripping its head back and forth the slug croc partly ragdolled Richard’s body as it tried to cut him in two. Richard punched once or twice then gave up after it barely scratched the creature.
After the first bite however, the teeth could sink no further. The burn of the saliva dropped to nothing as well and – as the tiny bit of Richard that had been ripped off dropped down the beast’s throat – something strange happened.
The creature shuddered and spit Richard out.
It convulsed slightly as the damage it had done to Richard was returned to it in a more lethal manner. Slowly it began to melt. Its sticky body turned into a slight puddle as its dissolution based stomach acid tried to melt the chunk of Richard and the chunk of Richard melted the creature in turn.
Richard watched slightly as the creature flailed, then walked forward and stomped onto its head.
“Anything here to sell? I think I remember hearing the stomach acid in a lot of the creatures is worth a lot…fuck it.”
Pulling out a thin knife that looked somewhat like a long needle, Richard very roughly skinned and ripped out a giant bag before heading back the way he had come carying his slimy prize like a bag of groceries.
“I want a cannon, but I think I’ll mix things up for the extermination run. Does this dungeon have a scoreboard? I haven’t speedrun anything before, but it could be fun?” Richard continued to talk to the air – trying to ignore the loss of of a conversation partner.
…
Returning a few hours later, Richard hefted a massive tube covered contraption. It had a fancy name and list of capabilities but as far as he was concerned it was the flamewoofer3000. Molotov cocktail launching flamethrower ass mega gun.
No one sold boombox style attachments for guns, so Richard made do with making funny noises with his mouth as he waded through death and burned poisonous creatures straight out of an alien horror movie.
Clouds of toxins were breathed in and out. They grew denser and more poisonous as he walked but…his defense had reached a tipping point.
With the speed the poison was increasing, his body could indefinitely handle it. A lot of the monsters were strong enough, but their main tools were toxins that did nothing to Richard’s mutated body.
The environment was a giant hazard – pools of liquid none would dare cross and dangerously unstable patches of poisonous grass and moss that threatened to dump you in the acid below. Technically the whole massive underground was built like a wheel with a path you were supposed to follow through seperate incremental zones...
Richard walked through it all badly beatboxing and burning everything.
He wouldn’t call the experience fun – he was wet and it was hard to walk through the sludge…but he was amusing himself and that was all that mattered.
Finding the biggest baddest looking creature in the swamp – a giant ball of slime with poisonous tentacles for hair like a beach ball had fucked a rubbery medusa, Richard bull rushed the mini boss and burned it while ignoring the rain of blows.
The ball cooked up when burned, becoming harder even as it turned black. Richard then used his feet to pull up some of the stone from underneath the sludge and create a series of stepping stools around the outside.
After almost ten minutes of effort – a good portion of the time he had spent in this dungeon –he managed to stand on top of the burnt ball and tried to keep his balance as he walked on top of it.
Immediately falling off and face planting into sludge Richard spat burning mud everywhere and gave up. Richard abandoned his idea of clown rolling the rest of the dungeon. It was kind of fun liberally applying the diplomatic effects of fire to the monstrous population, but it grew stale after a while. That was the main note that kept causing him to try random silly ways of progressing. Everything else blended together.
He tried making a stand-up paddleboard and a stone canoe to mix things up, but ended up returning to wading after both proved more annoying than his imagination.
Finally, completely bored with the dungeon, Richard reached the end and found a moving pile of kindling for the boss.
Burning the tenant and grabbing a singed chunk of hardwood before he even gained the clear reward – a skill for making fire burn incredibly quickly called “entropic flash” and some solid chemical defense – Richard missed the exit and ended up dragging his prize all the way back to the beginning. The only reason he knew he missed the exit was the smug sounding achievement he gained at the entrance rewarding him for taking the long way back.
“And training montage end” Richard yelled right before exiting the dungeon.
This should tie him over for a bit.