Chapter 79

Half an hour latter Joe and I find ourselves at the entrance to a dungeon, A gnarled old door the size of an adult human male. Openening the door causes a viscus cloud of green smoke to flow out, vanishing a foot from the entrence.

“Follow me, concentrate on your expulsion skill, you will need it. This will be painful, a normal person of your abilities would die very quickly. But there is very little risk of your body being completely destroyed, well at least as long as I am here.” Jack

“thanks for the vote of confidence” Joe

“anytime” Jack

Joe follows me inside, obviously trying to hold his breath. After accidentally taking a whiff of the air he lurches to a stop and curls up into a ball, clutching his chest. I take care of any creatures that approach, they are rather weak but are enough to finish someone off after they have been incapacitated by the air.

Eventually he recovers enough to move on, with some green bile slowly oozing from his pours before burning away. Unable to concentrate on talking he nods to me to continue moving forward.

As this dungeon is rather short and I am familiar with it we reach the bottom rather quickly, only taking an hour and a half. The boss is weak as far as dungeons go but he responds very quickly, fast enough that if you just barely beat him before collapsing he would be able to respawn before you recovered.

“sit over there in the corner and focus on expelling the poison, I will take care of any creatures that spawn.” Jack

With a grimace and a hand clutching his stomach he vomits, which actually impresses me as most people can’t hold it in that long. Even I am starting to feel some ill effects, but I have trained in this dungeon enough to be almost immune to the poison. Although I will be attempting to purge myself of toxins similar to what Joe is doing, I had never thought about it before he showed me it was possible.

Once he finally sits down to meditate in the corner the boss spawns, a type of monster. It has a face and wings where the ears would usually be, it sucks in the poison before spitting out a highly condensed form of it at you as its main attack, it also has an ear splitting screech which summons other dungeon creatures. It is the weakest of three possible bosses, not very durable, I can crush its soft flesh with my soul alone, which I do.

I sit down and begin to meditate, with roughly five minutes before the next one spawns. It doesn’t take long to discover some toxins in my body, there are tons of them, probably accumulated through years of training myself to resist poison. I have no idea how Joe is going about removing them but I am going to use my soul.

Before I manage to make any headway in that endeavor the next boss spawns, a type of vulture beast. It similarly dies quickly and I return to meditation. I manage to figure out several ways not to remove toxins and discover that I don’t have the brute force necessary to do it without skill before the next one spawns a dracolich.

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This one seems different than usual, its eyes glow with an unusual amount of intelligence.

‘Excellent, the dungeon lord decides to make an appearance.’ Jack

I bow to my opponent and the dracolich doe the same. The dungeon spawns corpses and the dracolich animates them, organizing them surprisingly well against me. This isn’t the first time we have fought and it may not be the last.

The corpses do not contain souls, rather they are animated through pure mana, much more taxing to do but offers you much greater control. This also makes killing them a little more difficult for me as I can’t just make the souls release the bodies and he can easily repair them if they get damaged, but the number he can control is harshly limited.

A quick count reveals twelve enemies, including the dracolich. He makes all of the undead charge me with weapons raised, attempting to block off my spaces of movement, likely a distraction for a more powerful spell. I blink towards him before decapitating him with a sword. As the bodies turn back into mana I sit back down to meditate, this time it will take much longer for the dungeon to form a new boss, taking control like that drains it.

Before the dungeon manages to create a new boss I make a breakthrough, removing some simpler toxins from my body. The abilities of a hero are incredibly impressive; they can improve much faster than the rest of us. If Joe had gone through the same training regime I had as a child he would be truly capable of fighting gods at full strength. He might not be able to win, but they would hesitate to attack him.

I look over at Joe and see that he is doing incredibly well, managing to remove toxins faster than he takes them in. I walk over to him and get him to stand up.

“what’s going on?” Joe

“you are going to fight the next one.” Jack

“wait what?” Joe

“better get ready, he’ll be here soon” Jack

Joe draws his spear just as the vulture spawns. A brief but intense exchange occurs in which Joe pierces the vulture in the heart and takes a beak to the jugular.

“that looks like it hurts.” Jack

Unable to speak, he just flips me off.

“come on, stand up, losing all the blood in your body isn’t going to kill you.” Jack

He just glares at me hatefully.

“burn it, a little bit of fire magic will take care of the bleeding much faster than healing magic, scars can be taken care of latter.” Jack

Gritting his teeth, he seals his wound with some rather inefficient fire magic. Obviously he hasn’t put much effort into it.

“Ouch” Joe

“I told you this would be painful, this is just the start.” Jack

I take out a couple healing potions and hand them over to Joe, who puts them in his own inventory before looking at me questioningly.

“These should patch you up if you get too beaten up, don’t take them all at once though, they have diminishing effects” Jack

“Ok, I get that but why?” Joe

“Resistances are useless if you can’t use them in a fight.” Jack

“Why am I not surprised?” Joe

With a grin I sit down to meditate. I manage to make decent progress, at this rate it will take a month the flush everything out, but my body will be come much stronger as a result. No, not so much stronger as it is I would be able to access more of my bodies’ strength, there would be less holding it back. Another positive is my poison tolerance will go way up, who cares about getting drunk when you can take poison made by gods specializing in poison and live. I should thank Joe sometime, I never would have thought of this on my own without a lucky break.

I spend the next several hours refining my technique before I am interrupted by a desperate gurgle from Joe, who is currently in three major pieces, over a fading dracolich. Surprisingly his soul is still attached to all three pieces, which undeniably is causing him agonizing pain.

“I’m sorry; I can’t help you with that, a mild burn or cut maybe, but not that.” Jack

A pleading look is all I get from him.

“alright, alright, I’ll take you to the best healer I know.”

I take a large cloth sack and gather up all the pieces of Joe before heading out unimpeded from the dungeon. Time to pay dryad a visit.

end chapter 79