Being in complete and total darkness certainly added a horrifying atmosphere to the exploration. For the first few hours, Maria’s exploration group didn’t encounter any enemies. She explained that for the first few kilometers outside of the city there were no monsters around, but after they crossed an imaginary line around the 3 or 4-kilometer mark, they would start encountering monsters who were roaming around in groups.
All of the non-humanoid monsters living in the Underworld were blind. Due to living underground, their eyes had deteriorated to the point that they had become useless and there were some monster species that just didn’t have them anymore. They track their surroundings using their other senses like smell, hearing, and mana-sensing.
The non-humanoid monsters were easy to take care of, even the ones that traveled in large groups. When Maria and her exploration team encountered their first monsters, they were able to easily dispatch them without too much problem.
Lizzy and her friends did make a few mistakes in their strategy, but it was only because they still had to get used to battling in their new dark environment. Prolonged use of [Night Vision] also needs time to get used to, especially if you don’t use it on a regular basis.
You can certainly see thanks to the ability, but your mind reacts the same as if it was still in the dark, so Amanda and Emily showed some slight hesitation in their movements. Only Lizzy, who didn’t use her brains during a fight but only her instincts, was able to fight freely against those underground monsters. However, there were times when she would get ahead of herself and accidentally get into a situation where she was suddenly isolated from the rest of the party.
Maria had warned her friends that the monsters living in the Underworld were vastly different compared to the monsters on the surface world, but it couldn’t be helped that they made some mistakes during their battles.
For the first few fights, Maria would constantly have to bail her best friend out of any precarious situation where she was isolated and surrounded by their monsters. After a while, however, they were able to adapt to their surroundings and fight as they normally did when they were on the surface while also taking the necessary precautions when dealing with the powerful monsters of the Underworld.
Every battle, no matter how insignificant, would always last somewhere around 15 to 30 minutes. Coupled with the stressful environment they were in, Maria’s friends and the exploration team would always need to have a breather after every battle.
Maria, on the other hand, was already used to fighting underground in this perpetual darkness because she had gotten lost in it for a few weeks. She had to quickly adapt to her surroundings and get used to it or else she would’ve been forcefully logged out of the game.
Usually, one needs to die 2-3 times before experiencing the logout penalty, but in the Underworld, the first death penalty was the logout penalty. The worst part about being logged out of the Underworld was that you didn’t return to the surface world or the last safe zone you were in before your death. Instead, you would be teleported to a random location around the area where you had been killed.
If you were unlucky, you could even be teleported into the middle of a monster group or nest and immediately die again. The only good thing about the Underworld’s death penalty was that the logout time was only a fourth of the usual logout time, meaning, you could log back into the game after waiting 6 real-life hours.
Maria had the misfortune of accidentally dying in the Underworld and she experienced the death penalty. Luckily for her, she had been teleported to a safe place the moment she logged back into the game after waiting for 6 hours so she didn’t have to die again. There was a large stat reduction that came with the death penalty, but it only lasted a few hours and that wasn’t the worst of the penalties.
To Maria, the worst penalty was the EXP reduction that lasted an entire in-game day. She had been killed due to her carelessness when she was exploring the Underworld. In a completely foreign space, you should always account for everything, even things that were unimaginable. She didn’t think that there would actually be people living in the Underworld, but unfortunately for her, there were. She had died to these so-called people. Even though she described them as people, Maria only saw them as humanoid monsters because they didn’t seem to be intelligent as they supposedly didn’t have a language.
When she fought them for the first time, Maria had been ambushed and seeing that they were humanoid, she tried to communicate with them, but all she got in response, however, was a blade to her neck along with some unintelligible growls and grunts.
Her newfound ‘kindness’ was what led her to dying again inside of the game, since she didn’t want to kill those people, but after Maria had been logged out–for the third time since she started playing Unitale–her goodwill towards those creatures broke, so she began searching for those humanoids and eventually found their settlement.
“Did you…attack them?” Emily asked.
“I deleted them.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
Her three friends were shocked into silence when they heard Maria’s answer and looked at her incredulously.
“They attacked and killed me first, even when I was trying to communicate with them, and I even tried showing them that I wasn’t hostile. They killed me anyway, so I just sought revenge and completely erased them from existence,” Maria said with a shrug as she explained her reasoning. “To me, they’re just unintelligent humanoid monsters like some of the ogres, goblins, and orc races. I have many monsters in my nation, but they're all intelligent and know how to communicate, unlike the others who I categorize as monsters."
"Okay..."
Maria ignored her friends' skepticism and continued, "I encountered other humanoid species as well, but like the first ones, they were similarly very hostile. Even when I tried running away and avoiding a confrontation, they chased after me like rabid dogs, so I had to exterminate them as well.”
“...So we’ll have to be careful of these guys later on, huh?” Lizzy asked.
“Yeah, definitely. They’re more troublesome than the non-humanoid monsters, in my opinion.”
“Why?”
“Because of their numbers and the fact that they can use both weapons and armor…” Maria answered.
Amanda nodded at Maria’s words and said, “Even on the surface, humanoid monsters are usually more tough to deal with than their non-humanoid counterparts because of that very same fact. We’ll have to be extra careful with them and, if possible, avoid running into them.”
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“For the area we’ll be exploring, I’ve already marked the places where I found those humanoid monsters’ settlements. We just have to stay away from those spots and explore the other places.”
“We don’t know if they’re nomadic or not, so we should still be careful,” Amanda quickly said.
“Ah, yeah. That’s true.”
After thinking for a bit, Lizzy spoke up again, “We should still explore those settlements after we finish exploring the other areas. Maybe they have some kind of treasure!”
“Yeah, we could do that…the last settlement I attacked was completely obliterated because I fired off one of my combination abilities. Ehehe~”
Lizzy looked at her friend incredulously and asked, “Just how much do you hate those people?”
“I was angry because they killed me, so I did something irrational. Sorry…”
“Figures. You always held a grudge against those that slighted you.”
“It’s not that bad…”
“Really? After what you did to those 'humanoid monsters', you have the audacity to say that ‘it’s not that bad’, Mary? Hmm?”
Maria turned silent as she began looking away in guilt. She really had nothing witty to say in return to that, since her friend was speaking the truth.
“L-Let’s move on!”
Not long after, Maria’s party arrived at the 10-kilometer mark and they took a break in the place where Maria had obliterated the humanoid monster settlement. It was located in a large enclosure that had two ways in and out. The space was big enough, so the exploration party began setting up their base camp there. They began pitching tents and taking out a bunch of things while the vampire dwarves that were part of the team started building walls and gates at the 2 entrances.
Once the gates and walls were built and they were sufficiently high enough to block any illumination from escaping to the outside, the exploration team began setting up the magic light sources they brought with them. Finally being in the light again, Lizzy’s friends plopped down on the ground and began laughing.
“Finally, we’re in the light again,” Emily said as she hugged Cali close to her chest.
Cali had developed some attachment towards this aunt of hers so she could always be seen in either her mother’s arms or in Emily’s arms whenever they were resting.
Maria sat down on the ground and began pulling out a few pieces of gray-colored tree logs from her bag and tossing them into a pile in the middle of the group before using her magic to ignite them. She had created a campfire for them because, despite the magical lights illuminating their new base camp, they didn’t produce any heat, so it was pretty cold. The fire from the camp had a unique pale blue color and this was because of the wood logs Maria was using.
“What’s with the logs you’re using, Mary?” Lizzy asked.
Maria began poking the fire with a stick before answering, “It’s from an Underworld tree called Edlvungr or something. The humanoid monsters use the wood from these trees for kindling and the pale blue flames it gives off actually has a pretty nice healing factor.”
“Oh, you’re right!”
“The light from this pale blue fire is undetectable to the underground monsters but, unfortunately, it has horrible illumination, so we can’t use them as torches.”
“A shame, but the increased health, mana, and stamina regen is really nice.”
Maria nodded before asking, “So, how was it? Fighting in the Underworld for the first time?”
Amanda thought about it for a moment before saying, “It was…certainly unique. Even though we have [Night Vision], we acted pretty differently from what I imagined. We can definitely see thanks to the ability, but our minds reacted contrary to what we saw.”
“It’s because your mind is still aware that everything’s in complete darkness despite what our eyes tell us. Also, it doesn’t help that the Underworld’s environmental debuff is affecting us.”
“What? We’re being debuffed? I don’t see anything on our [Status] menu though?” Lizzy questioned as she skimmed through her menu.
“It’s not that kind of debuff, Liz,” Maria replied before she then started explaining, “We aren’t in some kind of dungeon or anything, so naturally, we won’t see it on our [Status] menu.”
“Liz, she’s talking about the ‘invisible’ environmental debuff,” Amanda quipped.
“Yeah, what Ama said! It’s like the ones you get if you’re in a snowy environment or in an extremely hot environment, like the desert or the mountaintops.”
“Ohhh, those kind, huh…Honestly, I didn’t really pay attention to it at all, haha~”
“Typical, but Mary, have you deduced what kind of effects there are on us?”
“Just a few. From what I know, we have the [Fear] debuff constantly applied to us as long as we’re in the Underworld and the [Cold] debuff as well. It’s different from [Freeze] or [Freezing] debuffs, but if we don’t find a heat source and heat up our bodies, the [Cold] debuff will evolve into [Freezing] and after a longer period of time, we’ll eventually be hit with [Freeze].”
“Hmmm. [Freeze] is a pretty bad debuff since you could die from it if it’s not taken care of quickly…I didn’t think there was a [Cold] debuff applied to us. This is scary because, unlike the [Freezing] debuff, it acts slowly and most people won’t even notice it until it’s too late.”
“Exactly… I forgot to mention this in the briefing last time because I forgot about it. Sorry.”
“Never mind that. At least you remembered now,” Emily said.
“Mhm…oh yeah, there’s also [Paranoia]. A new debuff that I discovered.”
When Lizzy heard the name of the new debuff, she quickly asked, “[Paranoia]? Is it different from [Fear]?”
“It’s a lot worse than [Fear]. [Fear] will evolve into [Paranoia] at some point and this debuff will be visible on your [Status] menu,” Maria explained. “The debuff is pretty nasty because it has [Fear]'s effect that's been enhanced by a tier or two and on random intervals, various other debuffs like [Paralysis], [Stiffness], and [Confusion]–to name a few–will be applied on you with random durations ranging from 5 seconds to 5 minutes.”
“Yikes…that sounds bad…”
“If enough of these debuffs are stacked on you…well, you get the picture.”
“Ugh, I’d certainly hate for that to happen…”
“We can’t stay too long in the Underworld because of it, since I still don’t know what item or ability can stave off the [Paranoia] debuff, but there is a blessing that you can get down here that’ll completely nullify the debuff.”
“Really? What is it?”
“It’s called the [Tenebrious Embrace]. Here, check it out!”