Lucifer's Pov

Furious at what I had just heard, I raced over to Selenia's room and startled her when I entered her room abruptly finding her carving something out of wood. Before she could finish her first word I interrupted her “are the first adventurers that come here supposed to try and come to the core of the dungeon for some mission”. Only to be met with a blank face for a moment before she realized that something was wrong and asked when they entered and what they looked like and some other minor details before telling me that “they are not the adventurers sent to guard the dungeon entrance the response is several days too quick for that and the mention of my core and large rewards would mean that they are thieves trying to take my core for profit, bringing my wrath on to a whole new level.

After telling her to get ready for combat and get David ready which she looked at me confused for a moment, I made my way back to observe the adventurers. They were walking towards the first floor boss room or should I say cave, I have little hope that the boar king will actually inflict any damage to these adventurers if what Selenia told me about them based on their description is right, they are A-ranked at least and the only reason she thinks they aren't S ranked is because the dungeon is still standing. S rank was something she forgot to mention about adventures and when I asked her about that important information her face paled as she recalled what I did to her last time I thought her information was unsatisfactory. I didn’t have time to deal with her now because I’ve got more important things to do now.

Putting everything on hold to deal with the new threat I observed the adventurers trying to glean some clue to their weakness which will lead to their inevitable demise while watching I split a small part of my consciousness to activate some stone doors that lead into the ant nests, the doors containing my newest creation. This creation is something quite simple but will solve the current problem of the energy shields that are apparently common in the later tiers of adventurers These creatures are ants, but not like the foot long ants currently walking the underground hive but almost normal sized ones with the larger ones being 1 inch long at most. while Not particularly deadly by themselves with numbers they can drown someone in their mass of bodies alone, But their quantity is not their only weapon I've modified spider venom from a particularly nasty arachnid onto the ants so it be injected into humans from stingers on their back section or whatever its called. Once injected with one ant… nothing will happen, but injected with 20 or 50 maybe 500 then the small amounts of poison will add up causing their bodies to stiffen and soon become paralyzed if the poison accumulates, only to be drowned by ants blocking their noses and entering their lungs. That's if the larger variety of ants don't eat them first, They may eat fungus and moss normally but they quite enjoy meat from my observations.

The adventurers finally reached the end of the cavern. Completely drenched with clothes and boots full of mud they looked miserable. Finally finding hard ground to stand on they cheered while the rogue surveyed the surroundings before remarking “this seems to be the end of this floor the boss should be up ahead”. Hearing this the adventurers threw away their smiles and replaced them with serious faces fit for high ranking adventures in a dungeon before moving on cautiously I must admit that they show some serious professionalism for a bunch of thieving bastards.

Suddenly as the adventurers were forming up to go into the cave the boar king came from a thicket of woods to the right instead. The adventurers reacted instantly the tank going to the front and activating the runes on his shield causing a stake to shoot itself from the shield into the ground fixing it into place. The boar king charges head first into the shield, but just before it’s head and tusks make impact the tank forces a massive portion of his mana into the enchantment on the shield and a blue barrier radiates outwards from the shield dampening the charge of the boar until it hits the dug in shield only to come to a complete stop. Not allowing a chance to slip by the rogue dashes into combat with his dual daggers and strikes with his left blade and as he strikes activates his weapon lengthening the weapon with a razor-sharp energy blade that cuts straight through the eye of the boar directly severing the brain stem killing it instantly. After seeing the ease which the adventurers killed my first-floor guardian I decided to lay a few more traps ahead of them. I would just roast them alive with magic but when they are so far away from my core I cant use magic near them because the natural mana they emit causes my pure mana spells to be extremely unstable usually unraveling themselves before they can be any use or just plain damaging me with a negative feedback from failed magic. I have not tested it yet but I'm sure I can pump enough pure mana into my core room to use magic directly against my enemy's if they ever make it that far.

While the adventurers start to make their way into the ant maze I begin to harden the floor on a particular spot with massive amounts of mana hardening it to an extreme degree.

Adventurers pov (mage)

I have been In this party for several years now, being one of the first to join. It started as just a warrior and rogue, two friends that grew up in the same village, best friends since childhood they got along like brothers until their village was destroyed by the wars to the south forcing them to grow up fast as pack mules in dungeons. Mules are children orphaned for whatever reason who decide to carry loot for adventurers in dungeons, you would think that the adventurers would use actual mules because they are cheap and can carry more, but you cant. Any animal that enters a dungeon lower than C rank almost instantly turns into a dungeon minion once it enters. Hence the need for people to carry the heavy stuff, but adults are too expensive or have better options than being a mule so all that's left is orphans with nothing left to lose and a stomach to fill, this is one of the dirty secrets you don’t hear about adventurers. Most people think adventurers just go to a dungeon kill something then go to drink for a few days like its some fucking game. They don't know the death and suffering that we face on a daily basis for their safety or at least that what I used to believe in. Gone are the days of lore were the adventurers go out and slay the monster and return hero’s, now its just a dirty job someone has to do and the nobles won't pay for. Making for a lot of rabble with a lot of power with no one to answer to creating a lot of its own problems, pack mules being only one of them.

Zeke and Alen weren't the only ones to become mules in the dungeons most of their friends had nowhere to turn to either. Survival of the fittest for a mule would be an apt description if you were stupid brave or both, it's more like survival of the luckiest. Or survival of the guy who can see who doesn't take a mule with them to use as bait when they find themselves up shit creek, it's in the eyes apparently. Something Zeke is good seeing with scary accuracy, he can tell a mans nature by the way he looks at another person, which has saved us on a lot of occasions in this line of work, but I think all skills come with a price and it was a heavy price on him for that particular ability, he cant trust a person more then a knifes distance away. Alen got off relatively easier during his years as a mule he caught the eye of a particularly good warrior who trained him for a while so he didn't have to resort to thievery like Zeke did. After a couple years Alen started adventuring soon taking Zeke under his wing to teach him everything he has learned.

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Then there is me the sheltered kid, I grew up as a minor noble in a small town, Nothing special I could just eat my fill, order some maids around and have some security in my future, better off than most with the noble title being hereditary. Spending most of my youth studying light magic to try to gain immortality like the great mages of the country was my fantasy and I had fun trying to accomplish that goal, but all good things have to come to an end. This particular end came from my father, too greedy like most noble's he tried to ally with a smaller country to the south. After the rebellion if something so small could be called that, he held 2 towns and a large area of the Etherwood forest to himself, the towns themselves would be quite profitable but the forest of magical trees would mean he could become a very rich merchant noble with how expensive wand or staff wood is when its usually monopolized by the elves.

Too bad that kingdom to the north is very pissy about annexing their lands and towns so they sent the arcane university to take it back. Three weeks later the country trying to expand its borders is destroyed completely all the people in positions in power dead, some in their sleep others roasted alive. The country was soon swallowed up by the surrounding powers in the power vacuum that was left after the destruction.

With my country destroyed my nobility no longer existed anymore more and neither did my family because they were executed for treason, I’m only still alive because the family were out at a party with the other greedy nobles to suck off each-others egos and I was in the library studying my craft, it’s a good thing soldiers are lazy and stupid. I sat there in the corner of the library for almost a full day concentrating on keeping my optical camouflage active to evade detection.

After wandering around for a long time using basic healing magic on adventurers and villages to get by I traveled around nameless for a while. I met Zeke and Alen a few years later. We didn't get along very well at first but when I helped them on a quest into a poisonous marshland something they couldn't do themselves without cleansing magic, we started to get along better. Then after several years of adventuring we had added more members, even done some things I'm not too proud of but by now I am too jaded to really care not to do them again if the need arises then made it to A rank. Now we are going through this crappy dungeon that has nothing in it to kill so no rewards and the only thing that did attack tried to bite my head off. Luckily my optical camouflage trick still works against cats and it didn't notice I was actually a few feet ahead of where it looked like I was, In frustration I burnt the thing to a crisp earning a scolding from Zeke, but I don't get to use my fire magic very often, being a light mage primarily means my fire magic is not as good as my light but even so with lights poor attacking methods to non undead even half the power of my fire magic still trumps my light magic in power.

After a very short battle with a boar boss, we found ourselves in a maze with foot long ants attacking from all directions. The bloody dungeon guide doesn't even work here we keep coming up to cave walls, which is not unheard of with dungeons with moving walls, but these are just normal cave walls and the dungeon guide is telling me to go through a fist-sized hole to another part of the dungeon which we cant do.

We have started mapping the cave system while making our way through hoards of ants on our way, annoying little buggers but fire magic is quite well suited for clearing them out from behind a tanks shield. The cleric has started to complain trying to warn us to go leave this place saying that the mana spirits are acting weird, as a mage I can't even feel anything so I think he's just being a coward like he usually is, I don't even know how he became an adventurer, to be honest but he's a good healer if a little cowardly.

It feels like days since we have been down here killing ants and mapping this infernal dungeon. With potions and items, we have from the elves and dwarves respectively its not like the ants are any threat but they are just unending and my mana is starting to become harder to control for some reason.

After the excessive whinging of the cleric, Zeke finally snapped and told him “if you speak another word I'm gonna cut your tongue out if it's not for a healing spell you useless bastard” leaving the cleric stunned and me very satisfied, a cleric telling a mage about mana is ridiculous.

It seems as if we have made some progress the enemies have changed to include regular sized ants that have little stingers that the cleric warns us it has poison, at this point everything this cleric says goes in one ear and out the other. After being stung a few times by a few that got past my ring of fire Alen started to complain of stiff muscles, not being one to complain much meant it was serious. The cleric finally had something to do now which is nice to see him do something for once. As it turns out the little ants are more dangerous than the big ones, the poison they carry will paralyze you if you get stung fifty to a hundred times, not a lot when there are a thousand skittering towards you at any one moment. A party without a mage wouldn't last 5 minutes down here, they would be stung by thousands of tiny ants too small to fight and become unable to fight the larger ones. That makes this one scary dungeon, I’ve never heard of a dungeon trying to kill you with things that get smaller as you go along usually it tries to throw things at you that are ever increasingly large or deadly to ridiculous degrees.

Things are not looking so good anymore, after constant use of fire magic and drinking mana potions as if they are shots at the tavern, at a drinking contest, I’ve become exhausted and the cleric has been constantly using cleansing magic on all of us. We don't even know when we were stung to get the venom inside us, but we continue trudging on no longer in a good mood about the prospect of rewards or living an easy life full of riches after this because we might not live until after this. We realized too late the danger this dungeon posses, my fire has been our own undoing, I thought that the small ants had venom in them, a word I use interchangeably with poison a lot, even when I know the difference, which is why I didn't take the warnings of the cleric seriously. The fire has been evaporating the venom in the bodies of the small ants and entering through our lungs something the cleric didn't know could happen and something I was too dumb to remember sooner. Now we are surrounded deep underground by huge swarms of ants making the amount we fought before seem like a lie.

Unable to push back through the huge caverns with holes in the ground and ceiling we are slowly herded deeper into the dungeon probably to our deaths. We have tried pouch bombs, chemical scents even our prized portal scroll to no use. Too far underground to teleport apparently.

We soon come up to a roaring underground river that seems to go into the cave wall, it is probably the river that was diverted killing huge swaths of farmland nearby. I believe that the exit to the water-flow should be down into the valley below the mountain the dungeon is on top of. This being probably our only chance to escape we contemplate jumping in to take our chances, but Alen and Zeke don't agree they think we should fight our way out instead of a gamble and “that we have been through worse” and we have, but the length of this dungeon will mean that some of us probably won't survive the whole trip and the exhausted cleric, tired from all the cleansing magic is the first to suggest jumping in because he is the most likely to die if they fight their way out.

Our decision was made for us when the ants parted and a man wearing full black obsidian armor stood in front of the ants with a large tower shield. Tired and momentarily stunned at the new enemy we didn't react fast enough. The tank is tired but still moves forward as usual and activates his spike to steady himself, but the stake hits the ground and bounces off, unbalanced the tank only had time to activate his barrier which only worsened the situation. With the larger size of the charging man along with the heavy weight of his armor, he easily pushed the tank back and his barrier caught all of us with it pushing us to the edge. Just as we are about to go into the water we manage to slow the momentum. Thanks almost solely to Alan using his brute strength to hold up the tank’s shield so he could stand again.

Before we could regain our footing however a shadow flew straight at the charging mans back and dropkicked him forcing us over the edge with the attacker barely staying on flat ground, weren't they allies they both attacked us, why did she try to kick him over the edge with us?.

As those thoughts go through my head we tried to hold our breath or use whatever trinket we thought could help as I fiddle with the drawstrings of my pouch looking for something useful in this situation. I'm trying to figure out why would a river suddenly divert. When the realization hits me that the dungeon must have done it the air in my lungs escaped in a scream just before sharp rocks started to appear then everything went black.