Degritone carried Music all the way to the pedestal with the belt on it.
Dungeon cleared!
For your first time clearing a level 7 Dungeon, you gain
70 SP
7000 experience
7 Free Stats per level
This Dungeon will close forever when you leave.
If you are still inside in 1 hour subjective time, you will be ejected.
Upon touching the belt on the pedestal, both it and the pedestal disappeared alongside that notification appearing. After seeing how little damage he was doing, Degritone decided to use 94 of his new Free Stats to bring his Strength up to 450 and use the remaining 11 points on Vitality. He then immediately left for home, carrying Music and with Chuuni in tow.
"So, the cloak work?" Degritone asked Chuuni.
"Yeah, but the system refuses to give me a Skill for it," he responded.
"How well?"
"I have yet to take a single point of damage, even with reaching level 22."
"How dare you be higher level than me!" Degritone exclaims in fake anger, made more obvious by a smile on his face. "But seriously, where were you, specifically?"
"Inside your soul, technically. Kinda like the lands of the spectral tree from Randidly, but also not really. I believe it was an actual world that already existed, but we got isekaied to them. Nothing about them screamed newly minted System world, but once I decided to mess with soul stuff, I saw that the whole world was completely saturated in soul stuff, which seemed odd.
"A little poking around and I realized that it was... our? soul. It's still odd being actually separate like this. Having a whole body is weird. Anyway, I noticed some changes happening in the soul stuff occasionally and eventually figured out it was you applying PP and getting Path notifications. With a bit of modification to the flows of soul stuff, I was able to change that one notification.
"Once the reset happened, I lost all my Skills and stuff, but it was really easy to just manually apply the," Chuuni sent an unintelligible memory packet out into the world, "with images. After a bit, I found a way to actually modify the soul stuff in a way that let me see outside, and into reality. Once I did that, I had to... words won't work and memory packets are hard.
"Basically, I had to stretch the soul stuff really thin in one place, which allowed me to flow through it kind of like if the soul stuff was a cell wall and each individual atom of my body was an individual water molecule. It let me through without actually visually splitting. It was very slow going, though, because I wasn't able to stretch the entirety of my path at one single time.
"There was a bunch of different creatures that could swim through that space freely, as well. I'd imagine it like if the soul stuff was a pathway through the void between multiverses, but if the void was actually populated and if it was thick as molasses instead of completely empty. Got to 13 while there, then popped out next to Music with you nowhere to be seen.
"She was being Music. The soul stuff was thinner around her world, but significantly stiffer. Looking outside was a lot easier, but digging through to what would have hopefully been outside was significantly harder, if a shorter journey. We spent a few days to let me rest, but during that time some irrelevant stuff happened and we reached 22 during those events.
"Finally, we decided I was rested enough to make the attempt out, and it took 177 whole hours of focusing to stretch the soul stuff enough. For some reason, the soul stuff was more permeable to Music than me, so she got out a few minutes before me."
They left through the portal, some goblins shot at them, and the arrows were deflected by the end of Chuuni's cloak, moving instantly from its stiff resting position to the path of the arrows, the arrows acting as if they had had all their momentum sapped away once they hit the cloak, neither bouncing off nor shattering, just falling straight down to the ground.
Degritone sent a memory packet at the two to keep the goblins alive for the family to get experience. Together, they simply walked through the goblins' home. A few melees and mages tried to get some hits in, but after a few attempts, it was clear to them that it was impossible to get a hit in and decided to leave them alone. Once they got into the woods on their home's side of the woods, Degritone felt something touch him between the legs, accompanied by a memory packet from Music.
He looked at her, then at Chuuni, both of which were smiling. Despite the fact that Grimey Gulch was less than a minute's walk away, they didn't reach home for over 2 hours.
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"Does that count as masturbation?" Chuuni asked.
"How do you figure?" Responded Degritone.
"Well, she and I don't actually have souls, and even insects do. I don't believe bacteria do, but they're a little small. Hold on," Chuuni said before rapidly shrinking too small to see. A second later, he returned. "Ok, they do have souls, but viruses don't. We aren't viruses. Plus, we were inside your soul until recently. I reckon we share a soul, making us the same person, in one aspect."
"Was that a Skill?"
"No. The system refuses to give me a Skill for anything I do. Only Skills I have are the Skills granted to me by my race, class, and Paths."
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"Odd. I'll ask my Patron when I see her again. Anyway, maybe? Depends on if creating a robot and having sex with that counts as masturbation. It probably does."
Music chopped his forehead. "We're not robots," she projected with a way over the top pout.
"You know exactly what I mean. You literally lived in my head for 4 years."
"If it wasn't masturbation, is it incest?"
"Definitely. You're also both 14 years underage, but that's irrelevant to anyone with a brain. Well, almost a full 18 if you count your bodies' ages. You're both... well, Music's mature, mentally." Degritone blocked Chuuni's punch aimed at his arm. "But yeah, you look like a slightly younger me, you can both shapeshift, and you both started life with a large majority of my memories in your respective fields." He shrugged. "Plus, we don't intend to let those laws stay as they are for too much longer, if they can even be enforced anymore."
They finally reached the top of the hill on the way home. Degritone's family excitedly made sure he was ok. Degritone had missed announcements that various monster nodes had been destroyed and the first dungeon had been cleared long before he cleared his own, increasing new monster spawns' levels around Grimey Gulch up to 13. They had yet to see anything that large, but had dealt with quite a few goblin parties, enough to reach an average level of 12.
Over the next 2 and roughly a half days, Degritone, Chuuni, and Music got his family up to level 14 by hunting the remaining goblins to extinction. Finally, it was time for the village monster to appear. A roar so loud it shook the windows of the house came from the south west, followed by a loud thump.
"Enemy inbound. Contact in 3... 2... 1... now," as Degritone's dad said "now," trees came crashing down as a 35 foot tall humanoid landed at the edge of the woods, flattening a separated section of trees that Degritone had played in as a kid and snapping the tops off a large number of trees in the woods.
Unlike Beltag, this creature was not anatomically correct for a creature its size, looking more like an adult human simply scaled up to be 35 feet tall. However, its arms were 30% longer than those of a human and its head was replaced by a writhing mass of 10 foot long leaves. Where its nipples would be were eyes, and the entirety of the stomach was missing, simply replaced by air. Attached to its exposed spine were many ant-like pincers, and the bottom of its ribcage revealed the mouth.
It slid, throwing up huge clumps of dirt as it was headed straight for the house. Chuuni appeared in its path and it came to a halt with a flick of his cloak. Gunshots and magic were fired off as Degritone charged at its legs and Chuuni flew up and began slashing at its chest, all accompanied by the background song of Night of Fire.
A lanky cowboy shot their gun at it while exclaiming, "ONE!" They ran between its legs. The giant attempted to stomp on them, its leg moving fast enough to create a sonic boom, followed by an explosion of dust. The cowboy simply dodged out of the way, laughing before saying, "Shall we dance? TWO!" Another shot smashed into the back of its knee, knocking the giant to its knees.
Chuuni tore at its left eye as Degritone summoned each of his ghouls, going after its other leg. His muscular cousin jumped up and sent a punch into the bottom edge of its chest, sending it back a few inches. A second punch sent her back to the ground and out of the way of one of its arms attempting to reach out and grab her.
"THREE!" The cowboy sent a shot up toward its mouth as Degritone jumped up to its kneecap. It squished him against its leg as you would a mosquito, but through his massive damage reduction, he only took a few hundred points of damage. A stab toward the gap between the kneecap and the rest of the bones in its leg drew first blood. Manipulating his Mana into a huge spatula to make sure he wasn't leaving without this kneecap.
The monster let out another roar and punched at some of the closer ranged people, its arms extending to reach them at such speeds as to create sonic booms, but Chuuni blocked one arm while the cowboy whisked the targets of the other arm out of the way in time. "FOUR!" The elbow of the arm nearest the cowboy exploded into gore. The leaves on top of the monster seemed to dim their surroundings as the arm quickly regrew.
Seeing this, Chuuni went to cut them off, but the monster went to grab him. His cloak simply prevented it as he began hacking away at the leaves, which proved more resilient to his attacks than even the eyes of the creature, which at least deformed slightly. A large red line appeared from the cowboy leading to the monster as it tried to stand up. Half a second later, it stopped its movements as the cowboy sent another projectile toward the monster.
A budding-flower-shaped object was thrown by the cowboy to where its knee had been before Degritone's muscular cousin smashed the back of its knee, sending it back down once more. The flower began blooming as the cowboy sent another shot at the back of the other knee. This sent Degritone flying and with him, the entirety of the monster's kneecap.
Once again, the leaves atop its torso began dimming the surroundings as its kneecap regrew. It took both its hands and slammed them down at the house, but Chuuni blocked both of them before going back to tending the leaves. A shot from the crowd landed on the joint of one of the monster's pincers and its spine. Half of the pincer went as wide as it possibly could and stayed there for a short time before a loud crunch was heard and the pincer returned to its normal position.
The cowboy got a shot off into one of the eyes of the monster, causing it to blink that eye rapidly. The flower finished blooming and a huge explosion destroyed the entirety of that leg. During this entire fight, his aunts and mom had been pooling together Mana in front of one of his aunts. She finally touched that huge ball of Mana and it turned into a red, 6 foot diameter ring. From that ring erupted a huge blast of energy directed straight between the eyes of the monster.
Blood spurted out from the monster's chest as the leaves' surroundings became darker than ever before. It tried to block the beam with its arms, but they simply disappeared as they touched the beam. The darkness surrounding the leaves fully enveloped Chuuni as it become darker than a moonless night. Another shot from the cowboy into the back of the monster drew blood and sent it forward, into the beam.
Muscle cousin jumped up and delivered two punches into its back, further expediting the beam's eradication of the monster's chest. The darkness finally let up as Chuuni cut off one of the leaves, causing all of them to become inert. Just to be safe, he quickly took all of them off as the beam exited the back of the monster before very quickly dissipating. It extended its arm stubs toward the house as the cowboy sent another shot toward its barely remaining chest while exclaiming, "FOUR!"
Its entire torso erupted into a shower of gore. A flower bud fell from the location of its chest. Everyone backed up as the flower slowly bloomed, after which it exploded the entire remains of the monster into a fine, bloody mist.
Quest complete!