I

It was late at night and nearly everyone had gone to sleep already when Eva queried the guards about what she wanted to do. There were not a ton of groups using the gungeon, but it was almost fully utilized. She was able to secure a couple of runs overnight, but not a steady schedule like she had hoped. Still, it was better than nothing. She’d let her training slip since she wandered north in order to complete her quest.

It was early morning when Eva stepped into the dungeon for the fourth time. She’d taken a cat nap at the end of her last run, and now that the sun was up, she felt rested enough to continue. She hadn’t fought the boss again. Not because it was hard, but because fighting the rats gave more experience overall.

“Hey,” came a voice behind her a handful of rooms into the dungeon.

Eva turned around to see Sun approaching out of one of the side streets she’d already cleared. He had his armor on, but he was also armed and looked ready for a fight.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“There’s a problem, and we need your help. The omyeskadi attacked the other dungeon about two hours ago. I’m going over there with as many people as I can get together. I need you there with me.”

“Sure,” Eva agreed. “That’s what we agreed on. Do you want me to lock the dungeon?”

“Wait until we get there. We’re going to surround them and then lock the dungeon so they can’t escape.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Eva followed Sun out of the dungeon. Though she would have liked to continue, she had gained a level—and 5% more elemental damage—overnight, which was fairly good progress. Additionally, Fireball★ had gone to level 7, enough to do 675 damage to anyone hit directly, and about 100 to anyone within five feet. She figured that would be enough to kill anything under level 10 with just the blast, while the full attack would be enough to waste anything under level 20. Even with her boosted stats, it would only take three or four direct shots to eliminate her!

When they arrived outside the town, Eva saw at least a thousand forseli gathered and ready. She knew she was awful at estimating how many there actually were. The human mind was fine up to around 7, then it rapidly fell off. Once there were hundreds, the only feedback she got was ‘lots’ rather than anything approaching an actual number.

Soon enough, smaller groups broke off from the forseli assembled and marched towards the dungeon. Eva found herself with Sun and his retainers near the center of the column. Though there were a lot of forseli marching, they were quick and efficient. They kept up a jogging pace—a brisk walk for Eva—to ensure that they all arrived in about two hours to spring their trap.

The trip left enough time for her to pick Sun’s brain. She learned more concretely what she’d already guessed at: tiers were multipliers for everything. Fighting someone a tier above her meant dealing half the damage while taking twice the damage in return. Experience followed the same scaling, which she’d seen from the System notifications. It confirmed that she knew very little, and that the System was far more complex than she’d understood at the beginning.

II

It was almost nine when the forced army arrived at the fortified dungeon. Eva saw the dead bodies of humans and forseli strewn outside the walls, with piles that looked like they had been tossed from the walls post-death. There were no landwalker or omyeskadi dead that she could see. She imagined there had to be some casualties for them. Humans weren’t that bad at combat, after all.

“Ok,” Sun said, getting her attention. “Lock down the dungeon.”

Eva did as she was told. She blacklisted both the omyeskadi and the landwalkers. She left the humans and forseli alone, afraid that doing that much would breach her contract. If the omyeskadi used forced labor like the landwalkers seemed to, they would still be able to enter the dungeon. However, with the number of corpses she’d seen, that possibility seemed rather remote.

Sun barked orders to the other commanders, and the forseli army began to construct an earthen wall with trees for added strength and height. With how many forseli there were—and how many of them were earth mages of some sort—the construction progressed quickly. In only two hours, a rough wall had been created to a sufficient height so as to be manned by forseli using bows.

The omyeskadi hadn’t taken the provocation quietly. They’d tried to break out a couple of times during the construction, but the attacks weren’t their full force. Sun told Eva that these were probing attacks meant to feel out the strength of the sieging army. She didn’t understand why they’d want to weaken themselves in such a silly way, but on the other hand, the more that died, the safer she would feel.

Arrowfire was not quite able to bridge the gap between the two walls. Even her Fireball sputtered out before it could harm the wall protecting the trapped invaders. Their job was to simply wait them out. She could tell that they had trapped a considerable force, but exactly how many she didn’t know. Throughout the morning, reinforcements arrived. Some were forseli who had not been called up at the crack of dawn, but most were humans who had arrived looking to run the dungeon during their usual time only to find that there was an ongoing siege. Rather than just head home, they stayed to get their dungeon back.

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When the foreli finished constructing the wall, they began to make a second wall ten paces farther out from the first wall, but facing in the opposite direction. Sun explained—to her incessant questioning—that the wall was for the monster wave that was coming. Both of the groups were close enough that the monster wave would be enormous. It would also be the time the omyeaskadi would try to break out. The reinforcements would help with that, but the second wall would make all the difference.

Twenty minutes later, Eva saw a display of spells rocketing off in every direction coming from the dungeon’s fort. She had no idea what to make of it, but she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that sort of barrage!

Eva shook her head. That would be a problem for future Eva to deal with. The present her was starting to get a little hungry, and so she decided that lunch was in order while she waited for something to happen.

While building the walls, the forseli had found time to construct several large cooking fires in the safe area between the inner and outer circumvallation. On offer was seasoned monster meat roasted on a skewer and then sandwiched between crisped slabs of some potato-like vegetable. Eva took two in one hand and sat down on a rare bare stone.

When she had finished, she contemplated trying to make potions in her cauldron. She had several shards to play around with to see what happened, and time to burn before any fighting kicked off.

First, she emptied a bottle of water into her cauldron. That barely filled it an inch, but that was all the non-potion liquid she had on her. Next, she took out a Basic Shard▲ and used it with the water. When the shard disappeared, she was left with a pale purple liquid that she Observed★.

Hybrid Potion✦

Quality: Poor

Heals 121 health and 77 mana

Eva had not seen one like that before. It was pretty terrible, all things considered. She wasn’t sure why the quality was so bad—especially with the boat from the cauldron—but the results spoke for themselves. She put the potion back into the bottle where the water had been. It was better than nothing and it would still be useful as water in the event she got thirsty.

Eva was able to barter for a couple more bottles to see if it was just a one off bad result. She checked the water with Observe★ before making them into potions. She learned from these experiments that the quality of the water mattered a lot, so her first potion was as bad as it was just from the poor quality water! Several humans came by to see what she was up to. Though a couple asked questions, the rest left her alone after sating their curiosity with a casual glance.

III

A little over an hour later, the message she’d been waiting for popped up.

There are 12 days remaining

3176/10000 are still alive

New Quest: Defeat a monster wave. 0/3661 killed

It was time for whatever fight was coming. Eva decided to start on the outside wall and take down as many of the monsters as she could while the aliens they’d penned in figured out what they wanted to do. If it were up to her, she’d have tried to escape during the wave—just like she’d done with the landwalkers.

Eva pulled out some of her Mana Potions✦ from her backpack, and left her cauldron in an out of the way place. If someone took it, she’d track them down later. However, that wasn’t too likely as there were several piles of peoples’ things that were needed for a longer stay but not required for the actual battle.

The forseli hadn’t had enough time to properly clear the trees out far enough, so the monsters were on them much more quickly than in previous days. Eva climbed the outer wall and launched a Fireball★ out into the masses of monsters crawling through the trees. They were large cockroaches, which made a shiver go up her spine. Before the Tutorial, she had been allergic to them. After all the changes to her body since, would that still be the case? She wasn’t going out of her way to find out. In fact, more fire was the best solution to the roach problem.

While she was chugging her third Mana Potion✦, Sun came up to her with urgency in his steps. She’d eliminated around a hundred of the roaches—including one of the elites—in only a handful of minutes, and she could have truly decimated the enemy with a little more time. She knew why he was there.

“Where are they attacking?” she asked.

“To the side,” he answered. “Follow me. Quickly!”

Eva ran after him. She saw flashy skills being used in addition to a thick blanket of arrows being laid out over the enemies she couldn’t see beyond the wall. There were nearly as many manning the outer wall in that section as well, since the monsters represented another great threat.

As soon as she arrived in the section, she ran to the inner wall while Sun went about rallying more troops for the defense. The omyeskadi—and some landwalkers here and there—were nearly across the no-man’s land between the inner wall and the dungeon fort’s wall. She felt her heartbeat quicken. It was a wholly different feeling of being charged by humanoid creatures with skills than it was when the attackers were simple monsters like cockroaches.

Eva threw Fireballs★ as quickly as she could into the crowd. Since they were bunched up, she did a lot of damage to them. Each Fireball★ took out at least one of them, sometimes five or six if it hit just right. The arrows from the archers tore into the aliens to great effect.

Reinforcements were rapidly arriving behind the inner wall for the fight as Sun’s efforts called more to the battle. There still had to be many fighters on the outer wall to deal with the roaches, but they were relatively simple to deal with, even if they were of a decent level.