The first floor of the dungeon in Delnin city was exactly as Olady remembered it. She hadn’t been in this dungeon in over a decade, all of her healing had been done in the guild hall, built directly on top of the dungeon entrance. The fact that nothing here had really changed was actually testament to the good work done by the guild. A stable dungeon was a healthy, profitable one. The city only had a license for a level five dungeon, controlling its growth and checking its decline was the responsibility of the guild. Any significant changes in a dungeon meant the guild had slipped up somewhere.
The first level was a simple layout, one large cavern, with gentle slopes and a forest environment. The brush and trees were too dense to see through to the other side and was meant to obfuscate the monsters that abode here, but not too dense that a delver couldn’t push through. Along the edges of the expanse were some tunnels and caves that could be explored, but most just stayed and farmed the creatures in the forest. The entrance to the next tunnel lay in the center of it, protected by a large spider the size of a cow.
Olady was confident she could solo the beast herself if it came down to it, but she wasn’t planning on trying it today. Besides, if anything, she would be acting as support to the man next to her, an ex-slave armed with enough enchanted weapons to make a battlemage baulk.
Raksha eyed the clearing that was at the entrance to the forest.
“What are your abilities?” he asked professionally.
“Oh, I’ll play support this time. You know, a few buffs, some barriers, and healing if need be. You?”
He grunted before unsheathing his sword and replying, “I stab and slash things with my sword. I can also take a few hits with my armor if need be.”
Olady laughed, “you brute.”
The man ignored her words and stepped forward. Despite his uncaring attitude, she could tell from his careful and calculated movements that he moved with experience.
“I assume you’ve worked in a forest before?” She asked, keeping close behind him as he made a trail.
“Yes, the dungeon in Petle had its first 5 floors all as forest types. We spent a couple years delving into that. This level seems similar to the second level over there. Same type of trees, vegetation, and layout.”
He moved forward without pause, scanning the forest every now and then. Eventually he stopped and squatted down, motioning for Olady to do the same. She complied, despite her old bones, and scooted up next to him.
He whispered to her. “Woodwolf nearby, about twenty paces north.”
She arched her eyebrows. “How do you know?”
He padded an item on his wrist as if that explained everything. “Trust me. You got a barrier you can give me? It'll be easiest to just let it jump out at me.”
Olady felt a headache coming on. “You want to just let it pounce on you? You aren’t giving me much to be confident with.”
He gave her an insufferable smirk. “What, you can’t make a transparent barrier that can last thirty seconds? Shame on you, what kind of priestess are you?”
Olady wanted to elbow him, but shenanigans in a dungeon was a poor choice. Grumbling, she waved her hands and recited the spell, a brief green flash enveloping Rasha before fading away.
“Thanks,” he said, standing up quickly. “Stay here, there aren’t any other monsters around, but you never know.”
She watched him go through the bushes and kept a second tier barrier spell on her tongue in case he needed it. That kind of spell would be overkill on this floor, but like he said, you never know.
She needn't have worried. Moving like he had done this a thousand times, he walked calmly forward and didn’t so much as flinch when a large brown wolf burst out of the bushes, launching itself at his neck only to bounce back with a yelp when it hit her barrier.
The impact destroyed the barrier, but it did its job, knocking the wolf around briefly. She knew that a creature that agile would be repositioned quickly, ready to attack again.
Raksha didn't give it a chance. Before the wolf could get its feet under itself he stepped forward and cleanly stabbed his sword right into the head with no apparent effort.
Somewhat annoyed at the anti-climatic finish, Olady hesitated a moment before getting up and walking to her ward.
“Hmm, no beast core.” Raksha said with some disappointment, already having opened the chest of the wolf. Even as she watched, the carcass began disintegrating, returning most of the mana to the dungeon.
He stood up and turned to her, dusting off his hands. “Only about one in four wood wolves will have a beast core, especially on level one. We’ll just have to keep searching.”
“There are other creatures here, other than wood wolves.” Olady commented.
“Oh sure,” he replied easily, “there are forest monkeys here, but they only inhabit the southeast side of the forest and I won't be bothering them. Those are the type to swarm, I’d rather be in a larger party to deal with them. There are also some sort of bears to watch out for, but I'll be avoiding those too. I don’t plan on going to the caves either, so we can rule out those creatures. Some of the birds will be annoying, but you can hear their songs and avoid their territories pretty easily. I’m just hunting the wood wolves today.”
Olady nodded, impressed at the knowledge he presented. As they continued on, she couldn’t help but ask, “What would you have done if I weren’t here?”
“Same thing,” he said casually. He tapped his left greave, “This one is enchanted with the same barrier spell. I don’t want to have to pay to recharge it later if you are just going to give me free barriers though.”
Feeling somehow cheated, Olday grumbled to herself as they walked the forest floor. A few minutes later Raksha paused again, indicating another wolf. Olady once again set up a barrier for him and he moved up and casually slew another beast.
“Don’t you think you are underestimating this place?” Olady said as she walked up to him. “These wolves could easily kill any regular person outside the dungeon, but you treat them like pests.”
“Certainly they could,” Raksha replied easily, rummaging through the corpse. “Ah ha! Got one!” he exclaimed, now holding up a tiny bloody white sphere. Even as she watched the blood started to disappear, leaving the white surface unmarked. The man inspected it for a moment before shoving it into his sack. He looked up at her and asked, “50/50 split?”
Olady was about to decline, but thought better and ended up agreeing. It was only polite and besides, her church could use a little extra income, small as it may be.
He stood up and slung his bag over his back. “To answer your question, yes, a single wood wolf could easily kill a few women outside before getting put down. But that is missing the point entirely, there are no wood wolves up there. Or bugbears, or giant spiders, or any of the other monsters living here. For all their strength, the creatures wouldn’t last a week up there.”
“Because they would run out of mana.” Olady stated.
“True, but even beyond that. These creatures don’t hunt, they don’t eat or drink, they don’t reproduce, they have no sense of self preservation. They don’t have any of the instincts of normal animals. All they do is attack. Real wolves run in packs and work together to bring down prey. That strategy shores up their weaknesses and enhances their strength, but these wood wolves do no such thing. The closest thing the dungeon has to that are swarm types.”
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“These creatures are artificial constructs given a very specific set of behaviors that they follow without fail. Sure, they can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing, but once you understand them, they are hardly a challenge. These wood wolves will always leap out at people from hiding places in the bushes. They don’t change and they don’t learn. It makes it easy to counter them. This barrier trick is one I picked up from an old friend a while back.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Olady replied with a frown. “A few women die each year, even on this first level.”
Raksha looked back and grimaced. “I admit, if not for these tools I wouldn't be able to do this. But I do, and I am more than able to handle this, even on my own.”
“I suppose so,” Olady agreed, moving along with Raksha again. Then she asked a question that was bothering her. “How would you activate the barrier enchantment on you? Do you have a special tool for that as well?”
“Kind of,” Raksha replied. “This enchantment is especially crafted to be able to work with me, but nothing too fancy about it. Here, take a look.” He stopped and unwrapped his left greave before tossing it over to Olady. She caught it carefully.
Olady had seen plenty of enchanted items in her day, although she hadn’t ever owned one herself. Their functions varied a lot depending on the spells inscribed, but they all had similar ignition sequences, usually locked to a single user’s mana, alongside other safeguards as well.
This one had none of that. It did have a ton of other things she didn’t recognize, far too much for a simple barrier enchantment.
After looking at it for a second, she pushed some of her own mana into it. A barrier lit up around, glowing yellow.
“Hey,” Raksha complained, “no need to waste the charge on it.”
After a few moments, she handed it back. “I still don’t see how you can use it, even if all it needs is a simple mana push to activate. Men don’t have any mana to even try to push.”
“Well,” Raksha replied, putting the greave back on. “That is where you are wrong. Men do, in fact, have some mana. Not a lot mind you, but we all have some.”
Did this man think she was an idiot? Olady didn’t reply, but just crossed her arms and frowned at him.
Looking at her, Raksha sighed and held up his left arm. A moment later the barrier flicked back to life. “See? Enough mana to at least activate it. The enchantment stores some mana for me as well, so I only need enough mana to just get it started.”
Olday felt her heart pumping quickly, as she looked between the man and the barrier.
He must have seen something on her face because he quickly added, “hold on, don’t get too excited. I know what your church doctrine states about spellcasting, and how only women were blessed with it so they can lead and men’s position is to support…. Blah blah blah… I mean, you know what I mean. I am not disproving that, in my research I have found that while all men and women have at least some mana, women naturally have a much larger pool on average, women are also blessed by God with, um, what I call a mana converter. It is like a magic organ in them that allows them to feel the mana inside of them, control it and convert it, and with it they are able to cast spells. Men have no such thing. What I am doing is just pushing some of the neutral mana from my body out into a pre-inscribed spell sigil. It may look like I am casting spells, but I am really not.”
Taking deep breaths, Olady tried to calm herself down and tried to think back to the church’s texts on the subject. Considering it, nowhere did it actually explicitly say that men had no mana. It just said that spellcasting was a women’s curse and blessing, a burden they were to carry for humanity.
“Still,” she added, still combing through her memories, “if this is true, this could change so much….”
“Could it really though?” Raksha replied skeptically. Olady looked up at his face. “The only reason I can make any use out of this information is by having specially enchanted items. A single item for a single active spell barrier. How many different barrier type spells do you know offhand? Well, you aren’t a good example, but say a general mage delver. They would know two or three, along with a whole host of other tier one spells and a large pool of mana to pull from as well. The cost of teaching those simple spells to the young women is nothing compared to the cost of this single enchanted item. The cost benefit of this is crazy out of proportion. Not to mention, learning how to push mana was an enormous pain in the ass and I haven't been able to successfully replicate the feat with any of the other men I have worked with.”
He added with a shrug. “Also, the army, at least, has known for years now. It's not like I could have kept it a secret from them, I used my abilities liberally there. There were a few ideas on how to take advantage of the knowledge, but in the end, nothing really came from it.”
Olady still felt a little dazed and she looked for something to sit down on. Finding an uncomfortable looking stump a few paces away, she went and sat down, considering the man’s words.
What he said made sense, even if the whole idea made her upset for some reason. What was she upset at though? That a man was able to seemingly harness the women’s divine gift for himself? That wasn’t fair to him, she wasn’t sexist, she didn’t think. Women were just natural spellcasters, and that was the way of it. Honestly, after all her years of living, she didn’t feel like women were intrinsically morally superior to men and deserved to wield it.
But still, she couldn't shake the feeling that what the man doing was WRONG. She hated feeling that way and shook her head to try to push it away.
She asked instead, “tell me more about this mana converter. What is it?”
Raksha frowning and scratching his chin, considering his words. “Well, it's not a physical thing inside of women, you can’t open them up and find it, like you could the stomach or spleen. I actually don’t know that much about it, it's difficult to observe. Here is what I do know, the converter colors the mana, giving each woman their own unique mana signature, and it is through this converter that spells are cast, spells being etched into it like carvings on a block of wood.”
He turned and looked over at her, thinking about what to say again. He seemed to make a decision and added, “you are actually already familiar with it, just just don’t realize.” He reached into his bag and pulled out the beast core from earlier, holding it up for her to see. “This right here is a mana converter. For monsters, upon death there is a chance that the mana converter will condense and harden into a beast core, other times it simply dissipates into ambiance mana. I’ve never heard of a core condensing on a woman though, upon her death, so I am pretty sure it's just a unique property of dungeon monsters. But looking at the active mana converters between humans and monsters, it is clear that the two things are practically identical.”
Olady didn’t know how to process all this information. To insinuate commonality between monsters and humans was an insult to human’s divine being, but she wasn’t so blinded by church teachings as to be unable to listen.
She heard herself asking instead, “How did you even figure all this out? The church has no records of such things. Shouldn’t we have known, if this was true?”
Raksha shrugged, leaning up against a tree. “If you aren’t looking for it, it would be hard to spot, I guess. And even if they did figure it out, what good would it be to spread it around?”
The man had a point. If her own gut reaction was anything to go by, the church would sooner sweep this all under the rug than pursue it. LIke Raksha had said, it's not like they could do anything with the information anyway.
“I figured it out because I needed to,” Raksha continued. “I was in the slave corps, I shouldn't have to tell you what it was like there. I was desperate for something, anything to help me out. Magic was real and alive, but somehow, I didn't have it? When that power could save me? I couldn’t accept it. So I looked for it.”
“I found a creature called a jelly wraith in a dungeon delve. Are you familiar with it?”
Olady nodded, “The creature sucks the mana out of women, making them weak and vulnerable to their stingers.”
“What do you think it does to men?”
Olady paused, unable to formulate a response.
“The same thing actually. Men get fatigued and sore too. Symptoms of mana depletion. And I thought, how can that be, if men had no mana, why would they end up feeling like that? What were the jelly wraiths doing to the men?”
“But even that knowledge did not really help me. I felt like I had to have some mana in me, but I couldn't sense it, or control it, or feel it in any way. As the trials got harder, I got more desperate. A good friend died, she had helped me through a few delves, but there was only so much luck a person can have in a dungeon. Distressed, a few friends and I captured a jelly wraith and then I let it suck the mana out of me.” Raksha gestured to himself. “Over and over again. I almost died trying that. But eventually, I could feel the mana being siphoned away from my body. I was feverish and sick for weeks afterwards, I was almost left behind by the slave corps, left for dead and alone on the tenth floor of that dungeon. Thankfully, I recovered enough to keep up when the troop moved on.”
“But now that I knew I had mana and could actually feel it inside of me, I was determined to figure out how to use it. A lot of trial and error led me to enchantments, it was the only way I could use what I had.”
“How did you get all your enchantments then?”
Raksha gave Olady an evil smile. “I am afraid I will be keeping that one a secret for now.”
Annoyed at being denied critical information, Olady let out a huff. She supposed it was fair enough. The man had already shared more than he probably should have.
“So that’s that.” He added, standing up straight. “That's how I can use enchantmented items. You ready to continue delving?”
Olady felt like it would take weeks to digest the information she had been given. But meditation was best not done inside a dungeon, even if it was only the first floor. With a sigh, she got up and dusted off her rear.
“What the hell am I going to tell the officer when we get back?” she grumbled. “That the slave man carried me through the dungeon?”
Raksha gave her a smirk and indicated his back, “former slave, thank you. I can give you a ride though, if you are tired, old lady.”
Olady had to resist the urge to smack the young man. It would not be the last time.