The group walked down a tunnel large enough for two people to walk side by side and a few feet taller than April was. The walls looked like they had been chiseled away with picks or shovels. The tap tapping of picks carving away at the walls could be faintly heard but didn't get any louder as the group walked for several minutes.

"Looks like even dungeons like good background music." Kyle laughed at his own joke.

"Kyle, you still shouldn't talk in here." Garrett whispered. "Your voice might echo, and it would be hard to explain a talking slime to people."

"Don't worry." Blixie chimed in. "This dungeon has a skill that allows for each group that enters to have their own little pocket dimension to explore."

"How do you know?" Garrett asked.

"Why else would the guards let an adventuring party enter after only a few minutes of the previous party entering." She replied as if this should be common knowledge. "Do you think the dungeon monsters would instantly reform after a party left a room?"

Garrett thought about this for a minute. "Kind of like the old online games we used to play. That makes sense. Would I have gotten a skill like that if I had built a dungeon?"

"In time maybe." Blixie shrugged. "Depends on what skills you would have chosen as you leveled up, but I believe you would have had to get up to at least level ten before it even became an option. Based on how many groups entered before us I would say this is a pretty old and high-level dungeon."

After a few more minutes of walking the tunnel opened into a rather long cave about fifty feet in length and about half that in width. Stalagmites dotted the floor with some even connecting to the numerous stalactites the hung from the ceiling twenty feet above them. A few glints from the walls caught Garret's eye. He walked over and saw small veins of copper running along the wall. He decided to try his Earth Shaping skill on the wall to verify what Nyathanial had told him, but his mana just bounced off of it.

"Looks like Nyathanial was right. I can't use my Earth Shaping to affect this wall at all." Garrett told the group.

"Did you think he would have lied to us?" Blixie looked at Garrett like he was an idiot. "Getting anything out of a dungeon shouldn't be easy."

Tink. Tink. Tink. Garrett looked to his right and saw that April had morphed one of the steel rods she had on her into a pick and was smacking it into the wall where the copper vein was. "What are you doing?" He asked her.

"Getting more delicious copper." April said excitedly."

Scritch, Scritch. Kyle heard a small scratching sound coming from behind them as he stood away from April and her mining. "Hey guys," He called out. "Looks like we might have company coming." He turned around and formed two tentacles, ready to attack.

The group turned to look at Kyle and saw the wall across from them form a small bulge before a small molelike creature emerged, looked at them from behind the small, rimmed glasses on its snout, and then stood up on its hind legs. The mole like creature looked like someone had taken the head of a star nosed mole and placed it on stocky humanish body. It dusted off the green vest and brown pants it was wearing before adjusting its glasses with large dagger sized claws acting as fingers.

Kyle looked back at the group confused. "Um, should I attack it?"

"What do you think you are doing here." Came a slightly high-pitched yet refined voice. "If you have come to invade our dungeon, I assure you we will not be as easy to take down as you think."

Garrett looked at Blixie. "Is this how all the first encounters in dungeons go?" He asked her.

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"No Garrett, this is not a standard first encounter." She replied as she landed a few feet in front of the group. "Hello sir gnome." Blixie said respectfully as she bowed toward the mole. "I'm sorry if we have given you the wrong impression but we have come to see how a real dungeon should look?"

The mole looked skeptically at Blixie. "Any dungeon that could create an avatar that can survive outside its walls would be high enough level to be considered a 'real dungeon'. So why have you really come?" More scratching noises could be heard from the walls around them.

"That doesn't look like any gnome I've ever seen." Kyle whispered to Garrett.

Blixie looked back at him. "He is an earth spirit called a gnome, and he is the dungeon guide of this dungeon." She turned back to the gnome. "Garrett here has a unique situation. He received the ability to make an avatar really early on, but his actual dungeon is very small. He also wasn't born with the instinctive knowledge of other dungeons. So, growing his dungeon into a proper one is very difficult, but I figured if I could take him through a proper dungeon like yours then maybe he would understand how to become a great dungeon."

The gnome glared at the group with suspicion but after a minute he nodded. "The dungeon is intrigued with your story and says that you may continue through but be warned that it is not going to treat you any differently that other adventurers." The scratching noises around them receded into silence as the gnome turned back to the wall and burrowed away.

"That could have gone worse." Blixie sighed in relief and turned back to the group. "Who's ready to explore?"

***********************************************************************************

"How is this treating us the same as other adventurers?" Kyle growled as he clubbed an ant, that was about the same size as him, to death with his tentacles. "I swear we have fought about a hundred ants in just the last hour."

After the gnome had left, the group continued and had found a series of branching tunnels with small rooms interspersed along the way. Every room they came upon was bare of any type of decorations except for the occasional vein of metal. They had to fight a group of five to ten ants in each room they passed through with some ants crawling out of the walls into the tunnels as well.

"I feel like it hasn't been that bad." Garrett replied as he launched a spear of condensed stone into an ant that had approached Kyle from behind.

"They aren't very strong, are they?" April said as she whacked an ant with her metal stick as a couple of other ants chewed on her legs, their mandibles not even leaving a scratch.

"True." Kyle said as he killed another two ants. "But there are just too many of them. Besides, we haven't even seen a mole or those mushrooms we are supposed to collect."

"But we have gotten the carapace required for one of the quests." Garrett said as he reached down to where a slain ant had dissolved into a cloud of yellow lights and picked up the small, palm sized piece of red carapace left behind before putting it into his bag.

"We should be coming up the stairs to the next floor soon." Blixie said. "The mana is getting a bit denser."

They exited the room they had been fighting in and walked down a short, curved hallway before they found a carved set of stairs leading down into the darkness below, the occasional torch mounted into the wall creating pools of light.

"Nyathaniel told us that adventurers of our rank shouldn't go past the second level, so the moles and mushrooms should just be on the next level." Garret said as he stepped forward to go down the stairs.

You have completed the first floor. Would you like to continue to the second floor or exit the dungeon? Continue Exit

Blixie laughed as Garrett was startled by the message and he fell backwards.

"Does this dungeon have teleportation?" Garrett asked.

"Looks like it." Blixie said. "Once a dungeon gets strong enough and has enough floors the option will open up as a choice."

"Does that mean there could be teleportation traps?" Garrett said with hope in his voice.

"The teleportation skill of dungeons only allows you to let adventurers skip to floors where they have previously defeated the floor boss or to quickly leave the dungeon."

"Oh," Garrett said sadly. "Those traps would have been really interesting." Garrett stood back up and headed for the stairs again. "Everybody ready to head to the second floor?"

"Hopefully those moles are more of a challenge." Kyle said.

"Maybe we will finally level up again." April cheered.

"Alright guys, let's go have some fun." Garrett selected continue and the screen disappeared with a pop as he and the group headed down to the next floor.