“Quite a bit of the history of our realm comes from the elves and what they have hoarded and because of their long life spans. The knowledge they pass on to us humans is only what they wish it to be. While it might sound harsh or demeaning, can one really blame an empire for keeping secrets? Karvum and the dwarves hide the technology to build their flying ships for fear of what Arilon can do with it and the dragons.” -Adventure Salout during a discussion in the Broken Root Inn.

Umbra

The soft stone crumbled under her claws, turning into a cloud of powdered yellow dust as Umbra raked them over the earth. She was furious and wanted to be actively doing something other than waiting. She was always waiting while Aster did dangerous things, and she despised it. She was a dragon!

There had been excitement and hope when they left the tower and city, and it had improved for a while. They were able to train and learn together and finally fly, but all over again. She found her bond going into dangerous places she herself couldn't follow, leaving her only to worry. She felt the growling rumble in her chest and rise up her neck, but she stopped the noise from coming out. The two griffins and their riders were nearby, and it wouldn't do to show anything more than a relaxed facade. Still, she found her own thoughts eating away at her patience. She couldn't say she was upset, or instead, she was, but she was understanding of Aster’s way of thinking.

Her bond was strong, more so than any seemed to realize, even Aster herself. Not only had her bond picked up an Epic and Historic class, but grade one had given her two Epic classes as well. Her attributes were comparable to a late grade two, if not an early grade three at this point. It was for that reason that she had let Aster go into the dungeon at all. If she had been any weaker, Umbra would have taken her up in her claws and not let her go until she had reached late grade three at the minimum.

There was only the sizable problem that her bond seemed to have. Aster didn't seem to realize how serious things really were. Her decision to go into a dungeon alone had made that clear. Even Umbra knew it was reckless, and she hadn't entered one yet. Aster was acting in a way only she really could because of her background and age, not that Umbra could say she was older, but dragons did mature faster. Those two things made Aster look incompetent to others, and while she was far from stupid and worked hard to learn, Umbra knew that sooner or later, it would come back to bite. The attack in the city had put caution into her bond, but Umbra needed to find a way to explain what she thought to Aster before something else happened, not that she planned to let her bond leave her side as soon as she came out of the Dungeon. She had made up her mind that this was the last time she'd let Aster do something reckless, at least without her, and she would hold her trapped in her claws if she needed to.

Tilting her head and bending her neck around to look at the entrance behind her, she sighed, flexing the joints in her wings. Her decision to let Aster go into the dungeon had been selfish as well. She wanted to know where that dungeon she could enter with Aster was. It would not only give her levels to grow but also would be the first real-time that she and Aster had explored and properly fought together. With the upcoming event, they needed that adjustment.

Umbra moved her attention to the griffins and felt her snout wrinkle ever so slightly. There were also her instincts that told her something wasn't right. It was easy to connect the scales that the riders knew how dangerous and stupid it was to send a grade two into a dungeon alone, but they had pushed for it and hadn't given her bond any time to prepare. That reason alone made her claws itch to pluck some feathers, but she wasn't foolish enough to fight when the odds didn't favor her. As she dragged her claws through the ground again, she wondered what was going on.

Aster

The fact that the entire space I was in was made by a dungeon was special. The bigger fact that no one really had any idea how it worked or was created made it all the more special. The side part about it being some type of creature or monster that had and still was actively trying to kill me in a roundabout way didn't make that fact any more weird as well as cool. Ideas far in the future of replicating or at least trying to create something capable of doing that ran around in my mind.

That was the thought going through my head as I split open the chest of the Salem Beast and pulled out its core. It was the last one, and as I wiped the blade free and put it away, I looked at my hall. The few grade one cores from the first floor, the much bigger grade two boss core, and the thirty-two grade two cores. It would be a nice mouthful of cores for Umbra, and I could also keep some to use. Picking up the pack, I yawned and rubbed an ear, looking up at the ever-present, never setting fake sun. I didn't have an exact time for how long I'd been on the second floor, but it'd been a lot more active than the first. If I wasn't including the time spent meditating, then I had yet to even sleep, probably a mistake but one that couldn't be fixed now. Taking a glance, I mentally pulled up the quest and checked the time, then nodded to myself with a grin.

[Time until boss: 24 Minutes 13 Seconds.]

It had been a faster harvest than expected, mainly because of my skinning skill. Stretching and enjoying a relaxing set of pops up my spine, my attention turned to my mana, and I blinked at its number. It was almost exactly at half, more than I had hoped for. The three new levels in both classes from the dungeon thus far had been enough to bring my regeneration up a tiny bit. Tilting my head, I drummed my fingers on my leg as I made my way back through the trees at a quick pace but not a run. Regardless of what I hoped, the grade three boss wouldn't be an easy fight, and there wasn't much I could do to get ready for it because I lacked any information on the boss. I knew from stories that witches were spell casters and had access to spells, but besides that, I knew nothing, and that wasn't even mentioning the fact that it was a dungeon boss and a monster. The memory of Elyssa, a minder at the time for a dungeon run under the academy, floated into my thoughts, her words clear.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"You should always have an idea of what you’re going to fight. You don't want to bring the wrong weapon to a fight. What if all of the creatures spit acid or are venomous?”

In this case, poison wasn't the threat. Curses and a witch were, but the fact remained that I had gone into the dungeon blind, even if the choice of going in at the time hadn't been a choice at all with what had been offered. There was still a spike of anger at having to complete the dungeon to prove I was capable.

I hadn't thought about it at the time, but I didn't see why I had to run this dungeon and not the one that had been offered as a payment. Umbra was my Bond. We were meant to work and fight together. Huffing in a bit of anger, I forced myself to take a breath. At least I was getting a few things out of it.

The reward of being able to run a dungeon with Umbra would be the most important, and the rewards I had gotten would be a nice addition as well, even if I couldn't look at or use the bottle of Amber Moss until I got out. As it turned out, having a dungeon reward appear inside of a storage space was a double-edged sword. Taking a moment to look around the clearing, I wondered what to do with my pack. I didn't want the cores breaking because of something that could have been prevented, but at the same time, without knowing what the boss could do, was putting it anywhere safe?

Shrugging it off, I looked back to the forest, and, moving into the woods a few dozen feet, I found a decent area and set it in between the roots of a tree. It would be the best spot for it for now. Before heading back, I opened the top of the bag and pulled out the last rune-etched arrow. My entire stack totaled up to two rune etched and five normal arrows. Both of the rune-etched arrows were the freezing burst ones, and I didn't expect them to do a whole lot against a grade three, but even a distraction could prove to be the difference. With the fight being between most likely a ranged one, seven arrows wasn't a lot. Closing the distance if the fight didn't end exceptionally fast would become mandatory, if it was possible at all. Blinking a few times, I dismissed the thoughts. My twitching tail and tapping foot told me that my nervousness was starting to get the better of me, and even with the air In the cave being warm, meditation to regain just a bit more mana would suit me better. Finding a spot relatively undisturbed in the clearing, I sat down and crossed my legs, closing my eyes. Falling into meditation this time around wasn't easy and took a few moments as I pushed away the thoughts of the upcoming fight and the aches and slight burning in my sides. The brief moment of enjoying the lack of any directed thoughts was refreshing, even without a relaxing breeze or cool air.

If I was blunt with myself, the idea of mediation at first seemed to be a joke. With the entire course being taught by a tree, it seemed lacking compared to the other courses, a single skill learned, something that couldn't be used effectively in hunting or fighting, but as proven by the advancement of the skill, it could be used in a lot of different ways. The version I had, Frost Affinity Meditation, was almost useless in this dungeon, but that was only for now. When I was with Umbra and the cool air, she naturally seemed to let off, mixed with her ability to create ice, the meditation skills effect skyrocketed. Eventually, I wanted to find a way to create my own ice to use. It would be helpful, but after this dungeon, there wasn't much of a chance that Umbra and I would be separate for quite a while. That fact had a smile crossing my face. Umbra and I would run a dungeon together. That would make all of this worth it.

All too soon, the time for meditating came to an end, and it was time to get up and prepare. Setting my bow on the ground, I started a quick stretch, loosening up my joints. The last thing I would want was to end up with a stiff muscle or already bruised skin that would refuse to stretch or, worse, tear. After the quick minute warm-up, I checked the time as I grabbed my bow.

[Time until boss: 3 Minutes 27 Seconds.]

Getting to the center of the village, where it would appear according to the quest, only took a minute, and scaling the side of one of the roofs in the middle took even less time. With only around a dozen buildings, the village was small, and each of the houses was made of the same wood walls and thatch roofs, only slightly varying in size. After the boss fight, I'd look through each house and take anything not nailed down. A bed and desk might seem mundane, but after sleeping on the ground for nearly a month, I'd grown to miss the small luxuries.

The center of the village was almost circular with a large patch of flat packed earth, giving a large amount of room in the middle, and after scaling one of the nearby roofs, I watched, looking around curiously. Outside of dungeons, monsters appearing in the world happened in locations that were mana-heavy or had large amounts of unused mana in the land. The Claw Woods was one such area, at least on the outer edge of the forest, where Kluni didn't absorb as much of the mana. When a monster did appear in front of people, it was described as a white, black, or other color of mist condensing into an orb or shard and then the monster's flesh and skin appearing around it.

Recounts of people who'd written It down had described it as unnerving and wrong in ways they couldn't explain. All that I read about the appearance made me want to see it on my own, if not for research, then just to say I had seen it. It did leave the question of whether monster summoning would be any different inside a dungeon or if it was different for a boss. There was probably an answer inside a book somewhere, but I was about to find out now.

As the last few seconds of the timer ticked down, I pulled an arrow off of a loop, placed it on the string, and watched. Above, the orb of light in the ceiling dimmed slowly, but I didn't look up. Instead, my attention was firmly on the circle of runes that had started to glow on the ground in the middle of the dirt clearing. The glow was an ominous red and grew brighter as another row of runes appeared inside the circle, then another, and finally a fourth. The runes grew hard to look at, and I felt my eyes water as I tried to watch out of the edge of my vision.

A cackling laugh that seemed to emanate from the air itself, full of malice and glee. It sent a full shudder through my body, and I could only watch as a creature rose from the middle of the formation. The Witch was something out of a horror story. Wrinkled ashen skin, abnormally long and crooked teeth, and sunken, pale, milky eyes mixed to give her face a grotesque look. Her too-long and weirdly bent fingers that twitched and sparked with black light only added to the feeling of uncanny that I felt. As the light faded, I could make out the faded and thread-bare red robes that covered the body of the Witch. They looked in no better shape than the boss. While on the outside, the boss looked frail, I could feel Lesser Draconic Instinct giving an almost constant warning of a threat directed at the Boss. I hesitated slightly but pulled back an arrow as the light fully began to fade. As soon as I started to push mana into the arrow for a skill, the witch's head snapped like a whip in my direction, and its blank eyes stared at me. My reaction was slightly delayed out of surprise, but as it raised its hand and my instincts screamed a warning, I moved the mana going into my bow and redirected it into Stalker’s Movement, then pushed off the roof. Behind me, a black arc of crackling lightning traced from the outstretched finger to the roof, and the roof exploded. Fiber and wood fragments exploded outward, and a hole big enough to allow Umbra though was torn open. I skidded to a stop as my feet landed on the next roof and started at the damage in shock. No build-up or warning, just a gesture. This wasn't going to be easy.