Early in the morning the next day, Uraraka and Toga departed for another expedition to look for something that their ever-hungry Dungeon could eat and obtain some additional boons from.
This time, Uraraka decided to check the area on the other side of the river, looking from the Dungeon entrance. This, naturally, forced them to deal with one major obstacle first. Namely, the river.
It was about ten meters wide, one to two meters deep, and seemed to have a rather strong current. That made it at least theoretically dangerous, as you could lose your footing and then hit some rock with your head and drown, especially if you weren’t cautious.
And then, there was another problem.
“Wait, we’re crossing the river?” Toga says as they arrive at the edge of it. “I don’t wanna!” She replies when Uraraka nods. “I’ll get all wet and that’s yucky!”
“Are you being serious right now?” Uraraka glares at her, clearly tired of her whining. “I get it that you’re really embracing those cat vibes, but this starts becoming a parody of itself. Not to mention being annoying.”
It’s not that, for once
She always reacted like that, really doesn’t like being wet, especially with her clothes on
I think it got worse when she became a beastkin because now most of her body is covered in fur and that she doesn’t want it wet
“Then how are you planning to keep yourself clean?” Uraraka decides to try to walk Toga through it. “You’re gonna get all smelly, and no one will like spending time with you.”
“I can groom myself!” Toga replies defiantly. “Wash my fur in water manually, part by part. Like washing your hands but you do that to a whole body. I don’t wanna get myself soaked, though! It’s yucky!”
She was like that before?
sort of
Maybe she was actually a cat all along? Just one with a human vampire quirk?
So it made her look like a human vampire, and thus have a human body and vampiric properties?
…
This is an absolute bullshit and I can’t believe that I wasted time listening to those words
Uraraka sighs. She had such great hopes for today, and then here they were. Having problems crossing the river.
“I genuinely planned to just kick you into the water and then just drag you to the other side, but on second thought, I’d feel bad about myself if I did.” She then announces. This made Toga immediately give her puppy eyes, clearly in hopes of making sure that she wouldn’t change her mind. It seems that being in the water was really a horrifying prospect to her. “Let’s find a place where we can cross it while getting slightly less wet.”
“Woohoo!” Toga waves her hands up. “Let’s go then!”
***
It took them two hours (at least that’s Tomura’s estimation of it) of walking downstream before they found a place where they could cross the river. Or, to be exact, where Toga could cross the river without getting completely soaked in water.
Or, to be even more exact, without getting soaked in water too much . She managed to [Cat Leap] off a very big rock lying by the side of the river, landing almost on the other end of the river, getting wet only beneath her knees.
She still ended up performing another [Cat Leap], landing on the opposite side of the river, and not only getting visibly bristled but also hissing loudly over the horrid experience of landing in the water.
She really was acting like a cat.
You’re not going to, errr, howl at the moon or anything?
“Very funny, Izuku.” Uraraka sighs as she gets out of the water on the other side. Unlike Toga, she simply walked through it, which meant that she got wet until the middle of her chest. But she didn’t care about it all that much. “I’m not going to howl at any celestial bodies. But I can imagine myself growling at someone if they annoy me. I guess we did obtain some traits of the animals that we partially became.”
“Only some of them?” Toga asks, staring at Uraraka from a rock in front of her, the girl having clearly regained control over herself after the truly traumatic contact with water. “Not all?”
“Yeah?” Uraraka replies. “Why are you…”
“Take this then!” Toga then throws something right over Uraraka’s head. “Catch!”
It’s a stick.
It disappears in the water just as Uraraka is staring Toga down, saying absolutely nothing.
At least until she pulls something from under her backpack. Her new ‘gift’ from Izuku, that pushed her AML slightly above the current accommodation limit of their dungeon, but she took it while leaving it and was going to leave them down before resting. All to check out if this would allow them to rest while improving their equipment.
It was a javelin.
“Start running.” She then says coldly to Toga, who shrieks and jumps behind the rock.
***
In the end, Uraraka ended up not throwing a javelin at Toga, although she was severely tempted to do so.
They’ve thus resumed their expedition through the forest on the other side of the river. Unlike ‘their’ side of it, it didn’t lead up to a tall cliff but instead it was a much gentler mountain slope covered in thick woods.
Uraraka walked on the ground, sniffing the air regularly and listening in to any distant noises. Toga was doing mostly the same, except she did her best to climb every cool looking tree around.
And yet, they’ve found nothing. The forest seemed to be just that - a forest. There were trees, regular signs of animals here and there and… that was all. It was an interesting stroll through the forest, but nothing more than that.
By Tomura’s calculations they were walking through the forest for about five hours when Uraraka suddenly stopped walking and started loudly sniffing the air, Toga jumping off the nearby tree and landing right next to her.
What is it, Ochako?
“I can smell something… something strange.” Uraraka replies, ceasing her sniffing for a few seconds before returning to the sniffing with twice the intensity. “Something… damp?”
“Ehh?!” Toga gasps loudly. “You can smell that? That’s…so embarrassing.” She covers her face with her hands while blushing furiously under them.
…
…
Uraraka ceases her sniffing, sighs loudly, switches her spear to her shield arm, and then uses her right hand to karate chop Toga in the head. The catgirl jumps back, massaging the top of her head.
“Owww!” She lets out a pained squeal. “What was that for?!”
“You act horny, you get the bonky.” Uraraka replies dryly while grabbing her spear with her right hand again. “Let’s follow the smell, I’m curious what it is.”
***
By now they had a relatively good reading on the difference between the sense of smell that Toga and Uraraka now commanded. Uraraka’s smell had a significantly larger range, managing to detect fainter smells. However, Toga’s nose seemed to be much more detailed .
She picked up the smell in question a few minutes later, and immediately didn’t like it.
“It’s damp but there’s more to it than just wetness.” She announces while covering her nose. “It stinks! Like an old, ruined building, with broken windows and after a season or two of heavy rain. It smells of mold, poop and rotten wood. Bleh.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely not smelling very good.” Uraraka sighs. “And it’s only getting worse the closer we get to it. I think we’re a hundred, maybe two hundred meters away from whatever that is.”
You can approach it, right?
“Yeah, it stinks but it’s not that bad.” Uraraka replies. “It’s not enjoyable but it’s also not enough to make me run and bawl. We’ll be fine. Although, well, that depends on what we’ll find there.”
***
The smell was coming from a crack in the rocky ground. It looked as if something slammed a giant hammer into the ground, making the whole thing just… crack . The deepest fragment of said crack seemed to be going deep enough for the bottom of it to disappear in darkness.
That’s where the smell was coming from.
“It feels as if… whatever crack this is, it reached some near-surface cavern.” Uraraka decides as she stares down the hole. “There is a clear air draft coming from in, so it likely has an exit somewhere else, and that’s why we could smell it from a distance.”
Why does it smell of rotting wood, though?
“Dunno, but it’s a really strong, nearby smell.” Uraraka replies. “Alright then. Toga? I’m going to find a place to attach the rope to. You’re going down there first.”
“Huh, why me?” Toga replies, blinking at her. “It’s stinky!”
“Because if it’s dangerous down there, you’ll manage to get out of it much quicker.” Uraraka replies patiently. “The sides of the shaft are uneven enough to let me climb them, but you can do it much, much faster. Besides, you’re the party’s rogue! You can walk around quietly! It’s literally your job.”
Toga glances at the hole before sighing loudly.
“Alright. Alright!” She then announces with a resignation in her voice. “But I’m keeping my boots on, I don’t want to step into something smelly.”
Your terms are acceptable.
***
Even with Toga’s agility and the rope being there, getting down wasn’t something that she could do in an instant, especially as the shaft was definitely deep enough for its surface to be pitch-black, even to them.
Worse than that, it was a pretty narrow crevice and she had to make sure she wouldn’t get injured by any of the rock outcroppings on all sides.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
But after a while of it, she manages to get to the bottom of it. The crack does, indeed, reach an underground cavern, having opened up its ceiling and causing a lot of rocks to collapse into the cavern’s floor. Before being moved to both sides of it.
It’s really dark. Toga can barely see anything.
Ochako, Toga reached the bottom.
Drop the torch.
yes, she definitely reached the bottom, and in more ways than one
Huh?
A torch falls down the shaft, Toga catching it mid-flight and then spending a while doing her best to light it up - and succeeding. It required a moment of holding the torch between her legs and doing her best with the flint, which occupied both her hands.
What exactly were the torches soaked in? They don’t know. But it burns decently well and doesn’t produce smoke.
The torch illuminates the cavern. It’s quite large, ten meters by five meters by five meters, with the hole she entered through being close to one end of it. They can see a tunnel exiting it on the opposite end of it, and around it…
Fucking jackpot!
“What is it?!” Uraraka shouts her question down the shaft.
I think it's a mine, Ochako.
An abandoned mine.
Toga can see pit props and what looks like an endpoint of a minecart railway up ahead.
Uraraka whistles loudly. That did sound like another intriguing place to explore. She’s no speleologist, but this feels like something super interesting! And it also sounds like an awesome new biome to the Dungeon!
“I’m going down.” She decides. “Time for some exploring!”
***
“Hmmm…” Uraraka hums as she examines the walls of the cavern underneath. “I think that they’ve used explosives here, but they didn’t realize how close they were to the surface and the rock cracked through. Probably some weaker spot in it.”
“Weaker spot?” Toga asks, sparing Izuku from doing the same thing. “Rocks have those?”
“The rocks above might have been eroded by rain in one particular place, so when the explosion happened, the rock didn’t react to it as the explosive handlers thought it would.” Uraraka replies. She has no idea how she knows that. Must have been her Mining skill at work. Huh. “Let’s get going. I want to know what this place is.”
***
They walk for maybe a few meters. There is a corridor branching off into a large room with uneven walls, clearly carrying signs of some extensive mining. When they enter it, the limestone surrounding them is marred by lengthy scars of some dark red stone.
Uraraka approaches it and scratches some of it with the tip of her javelin. Izuku can see some reddish dust left on it when Uraraka gestures at Toga to bring the torch closer.
“I think it’s hematite.” Uraraka eventually decides. “Iron ore, and a pretty good one. With good refining techniques, this could fetch a pretty penny on the market. Definitely better iron than whatever the local tribesmen are having.”
Ah, yeah, I remember it from my Dwarf Fortress playthrough
So it’s an iron mine, cool
That would be a cool second biome for the Dungeon
Yeah. But how do we unlock it?
Should they mine some of the ore? Will that be enough?
“Let’s just keep walking deeper into the mine.” Uraraka decides. “We might find some already mined ore, in a minecart for example. Take that, take some leftover tools if there are any, maybe pull a half-rotten pit prop and that might be enough.”
Very well, it’s your call.
***
They reach the end of the tunnel, having passed by another, smaller side-room where the past miners clearly followed a hematite vein into the walls of the corridor. They’ve already reformed into the usual dungeon crawling formation, where Uraraka carried the torch and Toga acted as a vanguard, closer to the edge of light.
Thus allowing them to hopefully detect potential enemies before they could detect them in turn. Hopefully.
The end of the tunnel was a large and completely pitch black hall, with the minecart rails intersecting with another one, going from left to right. Behind them, the railway goes all the way to an endless, square pit with some lever right next to it and right next to some complicated mechanism.
Elevator? But… Why does it only go deeper?
“Toga, hold the torch.” Uraraka says, handing it to the catgirl when she gets closer. “Follow me.”
She approaches the elevator shaft, lies down on the ground right next to it and then - with Toga lighting the area up - she spends a while observing and touching the edge of the elevator shaft, very carefully.
Ochako?
“Well, it’s kinda… weird.” Uraraka replies, her eyes still on the edge of the shaft. “This shaft was dug out from below . And the draft’s definitely coming from down there, for some reason.”
From below?
There are two options here, the more probable one and the cool one
The more probable one is that the actual entrance to the mine is somewhere a level beneath us, and that whole zone was for some reason carved out above it, maybe following particularly rich ore vein
The cool one is that this mine has been dug upward from the local equivalent of an Underdark, and there is an entire underground world underneath us
Which is unlikely, but it’d be super cool
Underdark?
Too long of a story, and besides you wouldn’t understand the coolness of the concept
Anyway, keep going
There was more to be found in the elevator hall of the mine. To begin with, they’ve found a minecart filled with hematite ore in various sizes and shapes. It was also doubling as a storage area, as they found crates filled with a variety of objects.
Pickaxes, shovels, chisels and hammers. Torches, torchstands, railways and pit props. Entire crate filled with what looked like spare parts for minecraft and the elevator. Ropes. Firewood, and an entire cistern of water, likely used for fire-setting rock. All of it rather aged, but most of it not to the point of complete uselessness.
In short, everything that Uraraka needed to perform some proper mining, and likely everything they needed to unlock the [Iron Mine] biome (or however the system called it).
“Awesome.” Uraraka says after opening another crate and finding even more of the stuff. “This will be extremely useful, but moving it out of the mine through that crack is going to be a massive pain in the ass.”
It’ll require a few visits here, right?
That depends on how unique this entire biome is
It might as well be enough to unlock the biome and that’s what matters right now
They’ll take a chunk of ore, and one of each tools they can carry, then we’ll see if we have to visit this place again
Right.
“Let’s check the rest of the level first.” Uraraka replies. “I want to know what else is here. We wouldn’t want to miss out on something super valuable and only settle on the mediocre, am I right?”
Right. Go on.
I’m genuinely curious who this place belonged to in the past.
It doesn’t look like something the beastkin can make, and I thought that they were the only group around, at least ever since the elves had noped out of the area.
***
The first side of the mine turned out to be… underwhelming, to say the least. They found a number of intersecting corridors, each of them nearly carved into a perfectly square shape, with railway in the middle and the wide enough passage on both sides to allow safe passage without the risk of being run over by a speeding minecart.
At every curve or an intersection, a complicated mechanism was installed into the floor. There was a mechanical (or, perhaps, magical) panel nearby, which allowed one to switch stop whatever was approaching right in the middle, and then turn the entire platform around, allowing it to move in any direction the operator wanted.
“Not a simple mine.” Uraraka announces after they pass one of the intersections and after she spent a while examining it. “Someone put a lot of effort into making it look good . Those walls were smoothed out, for no other reason than this. Someone probably checked every bit of the corridor with some fantasy version of a flatness gauge.”
“Is it why there are no more of those wooden thingies around anymore?” Toga asks. She was walking ahead of Uraraka, but not far enough to not hear what she said. And she could speak back.
“Yeah.” Uraraka replies. “That part of the mine where the crack happened must have been recent work. The miners used that wood to reinforce the ceiling before they’d move past that zone and make sure that everything was stable. This is how everything looks once they’re done with it.”
My earlier mention of Dwarf Fortress might have been more on-point than I thought
Did we just find the local dwarves?
The tunnels seem to be measured for someone definitely human-sized, though.
If my extensive experience with a variety of fantasy universes is anything to go by, all dwarves compensate for their small size by the size of their tunnels and other constructions
By how focused they are on their defense
And by how prone they are to taking revenge on those that wronged them
Like, you know, Nedzu
Actually, are you sure that he isn’t a reverse isekai fantasy world dwarf wearing a fursuit?
…
This is disturbing and I’ll retaliate with an even worse idea, sooner or later.
NO, STOP!
Don’t!
They’ve ended up hitting dead ends on every tunnel, while also finding several parts of the mine where the miners definitely found and exploited some hematite ore veins. That was… nothing groundbreaking (pun definitely intended).
And so it was time to explore the other side of the mine. There was clearly a way of going there by circling around the elevator hall, but they’ve instead decided to walk through it. Right after walking through it, they’ve found a set of open doors to the right, opening into a room with one side of it filled with wooden bunk beds, and the other with a number of tables, chairs and a number of cupboards that has likely held food and drinks once. No corpses here, and all the light sources have long ago died out.
“Living in a mine?” Uraraka hums. “That’s strange. I’d rather go outside to, you know, breathe some fresh air.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like the air’s really bad here.” Toga counters. “The stench was strongest by the entrance, because of water seeping in during the rain. Rotten pit props, mold on the walls and so on. Here the air’s actually pretty good.”
“Fair point.” Uraraka agrees with her. “This is weird, but hey, as long as it works, right?”
***
Once they walk past that room, they immediately notice a problem. Right behind it, a tunnel without a railway and one with much rougher floor, walls and ceiling started. It was also partially blocked with long-rotten wooden barricades.
They could immediately spot some worryingly large cobwebs around the barricades.
“I can hear something moving.” Toga says very quietly, Shigaraki relaying it to the rest. She has approached the barricade, while letting Uraraka stay a bit behind, to make it harder for the potential threat to spot the torch light before they could hear them coming. “Skittering sounds. Sounds like…”
Look at the cobwebs
Spiders.
Giant, fucking, spiders
“And at least a few of them, I think.” Toga replies quietly. She then listens intently for a few seconds. “Three. Yeah, I’m almost sure that there are three of those there. Or at least three of them are moving around right now. Each at least as large as a dog. Like, you know, a german shepherd-type.”
Never, ever, compare dogs to spiders
In any way or shape
Toga only rolled her eyes before turning around and backing down a little. She’d love to fight something, but giant spiders didn’t sound cute at all. She’ll do fine without getting to see them for a moment longer.
There has to be another exit from the mine there.
Those creatures have to eat something.
The miners probably Dug Too Deep and bam, spiders
Unless they came up from the local Underdark
Then they Dug Too Shallow and I find that hilarious
And then, there were corpses. They’ve counted four of them, scattered around that side of the barricade. Two of them covered in long-dried up web cocoons. Two others were exposed, being seemingly largely devoured by something. They were pretty much skeletons, with some dried out bits still covering some of the bones.
How old?
Hard to say
Years
Not as old as that burial site, but definitely years old
They’re not dwarves though. Size-ways, they look human.
“Hmmm…” Toga pokes one of the corpses with her finger. “Those are elven corpses.”
Huh? You sure?
“Yeah.” Toga replies quietly, but with certainty in her voice. “You remember the skeleton I slew and then carried back from Aeonia’s graveyard? Compared to an average human skeleton it had a flatter ribcage, and every rib was thinner but wider. I can see this guy having the exact same ribcage here.”
“That’s interesting, but I think it’s time to come back before the spiders notice us.” Uraraka replies. “Let’s gather as much of the stuff as we can, then we come back and try to kill the spiders to bring their corpses to the Dungeon.”
Izuku isn’t sure if a giant spider-infested mine was the sort of place he wanted to manage, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.
image [https://images.squidge.org/images/2024/03/09/imageee16447652d48941.png]
1. Entrance, 2. Elevator Shaft, 3. Barricade, 4. Spider Lair