Authors note:-
I wanted to finish these p.o.v but i am going to sleep now.
.
Enjoy
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Rocky's P.O.V:-
The Information box brought the worst news.
“Noooo!” I cried out, but no one heard my voice, my sorrow that increased after getting my hopes broken. I confirmed with Minie regarding the issue but,
“Minie, it said I can’t use the skill.”
“Well, I never said that you would be able to directly use the skill with class, weapon or any other kind of restriction, but we still have a use for it.”
“What?!”
‘Did I get another way to use the skill even though I can’t directly take advantage of it?’ I thought that, but my expectations which were again trying to fly, were once again shot down.
“Creation. Once you get your creation skills and laboratory, then with the materials and knowledge we would be able to create our own skill books to give as a reward. Now, isn’t that something great.”
“But I thought that I would be able to use this skill!” Yeah, yeah, answer me! Why can’t I use the skill?
“Ah! No, sorry if I gave you that impression. There is no way for anyone to even learn any skill out of their class, but you still learned it didn’t you. So what if you can’t use it directly! You still have a use for it, right!”
“But” Somehow I uttered that word and my whole world started shaking. I thought she would get angry and start guzzling out fireballs at me, but instead she politely explained it to me.
“What can’t be done; can’t be done. There is no way for you to use that skill. You either need to practice hard and gather skills slowly or you don’t get any. This is life partner, though being a dungeon master and having a sentience is a great thing, but there are downfalls to it too.”
I sighed once, then twice and then thrice. What I needed to do, I had no idea. All my ideas and dreams broke with her one sentence. Can’t use the learned skills, then what am I even learning them for, gifting them to others? Why do I have to play Santa for all the children of this world?
“This is not fair!”
“What! You are talking about being fair? So, you mean to say, having three elemental affinities is not fair, being born with a sentience is not fair, and having me is not fair! If this is not fair, then what is fair?”
‘Did she just say that’ I thought when I heard that.
“Your learning everything, becoming overpowered and playing god, would that be fair to you. People dying, and you learning their skills; Is this what you call fair? We don’t have time for this, our remaining two ants just died, so snap out of it.”
“Ah! I completely forgot about them. I wanted to try harming at least one of them with the ants, but looks like our plan of dividing the ants failed, huh.”
“Why do you worry so much? It’s a good thing that we didn’t hurt any other member of their team or that would have been counterproductive for us.”
I couldn’t help but remind her of this when I heard her being so optimistic and happy go lucky.
“But someone did die inside our dungeon.”
When she heard that, I’m sure her cheeks twitched a little. Although I couldn’t see it happening, but the small pause between her answers was enough to give that away.
“But he was a demon. You can’t say a human died in our dungeon. It was a demon, demon. Death of a human and death of a demon are two entirely different matters from each other. You won’t have to worry about that.”
Yeah, it was a demon that died inside the dungeon, and not a human. Maybe that would help us make peace with the humans, but both of us knew that this all was just our wishful thinking and nothing more. What our ‘friend’ had in mind was something entirely different.
The two adventurers who had killed our ants came out of the tunnels and went directly towards the villain and the earth mage.
They told each other their tale and decided to wait for their captain and the now dead archer to come out of the tunnel too, so they could discuss about their next plan.
But something that they didn’t know was that their leader, whom they were eagerly waiting for was sitting beside them or should I have said that they had no leader.
The reward which that the iron covered man and the pretty bimbo got were one of the rarest of the ones that were designed to be dropped by the ants on their deaths.
How I know that, I asked Minie and she conveyed this information to me and also told me their usage. So, she said, “you see, our dungeon is very dark and there is also the danger following the oxygen content inside the tunnels, so a normal fire torch can’t be used. So, to make it easier for them to survive and have a happy journey here I decided to add a vision reward, but don’t worry I have made it's drop rated ridiculously high, moreover, there are four different pieces that are required to use it. The lenses and the antennas are both required at the same time and they drop only for every 100 Ants killed. It means, if one wants to obtain them, then they will have to kill 400 Ant's for it.”
“So, how did they obtain them after killing only two of them?” Yeah, my virtual brows were twitching like crazy while I asked her that.
“That, I think happened cause of luck. I don’t know how 'Luck' stat works, maybe they have ridiculously strong luck or maybe it’s because of their nature. I don’t know, they just killed two ants and they dropped.”
I was going to get angry at her for doing something without asking or even telling me, but I was stopped dead in my track when I saw the assassin moving.
For his team members he was still sitting there dazed off, but to me there was no way his magic could have worked. He conjured another illusion and trapped everyone’s mind within it. Inside the illusion he was still sitting at his place and calmly looking towards the tunnel entrance in front of him, but in reality he was walking toward the entrance to the middle tunnel where he had killed the Demon.
He got there and tried to find something, but even after trying for like 10 minutes when he could find anything a frown appeared on his face.
“Where did the body go? Was he still alive? No, no, not possible or did the ants take him away? Whatever, let’s move on to the next scenario.”
He said that, used his skill and changed his appearance from a not so interesting costume freak to a handsome and charming, but the bloody swordsman with deep and long cuts all over his body.
After changing to his not so new appearance, he started walking towards the exit. When he got near the exit he started limping and heavily breathing, a simple look at him and anybody would run out to help him. He looked to be on the verge of losing consciousness, when others saw him walking out of the tunnel.
They ran to give him support and help him. While the red caped girl sat, his head on her lap, the heavily armored knight recovered some vial from his waist bag and poured a large quantity of its content in his mouth and poured some of it directly over his injuries.
When I saw his injuries recovering at a visible speed I felt bewildered and uttered to myself:
“What is that?”
And like always my stalking friend, who always taps into my mind to listen to my thoughts spoke without considering any of my feelings.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Those are health regeneration potions. They can remove light and even some deep injuries in the matter of minutes. They are a commodity that every responsible and professional adventurer carries with them.”
“Then aren’t those things a bit disadvantageous to us?” I couldn’t help but ask when I heard her say that. How would we injure any of these adventurers, if all they could recover from everything just with a sip of some potion thingy?
“When did we even hold the advantage to suddenly get disadvantaged? And even these potions have their limits. They can’t recover one from everything, moreover, they are very expensive.”
“Yeah, you are right. The conditions still remain the same and the things which we had to do have also not changed one bit.”
But it still hurts to see that dual faced chameleons ‘deteriorating’ condition improving in the matter of minutes and when he was bombarded with questions like what happened and where the other one go. His reply made my blood boil even more, “I killed some while protecting Roby and he killed some, while I was protecting him. Like that we continued to kill the ants and when only five of them were left, something happened. And only after fighting them for a long time, could I defeat them all”
I had thought that he would create a story of some kind to bullshit his way around his team members, but it didn’t even occur to me that he would suddenly place all the blame on us.
When I heard him say Ants attacked them, I wanted to appear in front of them and shout, ‘Where did the ants come from! We only had five ants bro, and all of them are dead now. So, whose fucking ants attacked you, you back stabber.’ But I couldn’t.
And when they asked him what happened to the archer, I suddenly felt that whatever he had to say was not going to good for us and like he was trying to prove me right, the answer which he gave not only eliminated all of the doubts about him, but at the same time made us look guilty.
He said, “There was one ant which never came down from the roof when other did to start the hunt. It waited for the perfect opportunity and just when I left Roby alone in a proper and secure place, to deal with the remaining ants…. He got his neck snapped in two by it and there he died fighting with the ants.”
I got late with my reactions because I was still thinking that how could someone be so shameless, but Minie was not slow with her cursing.
“Fuck, what do you think we are? Are we a hole for assholes like him to come and shit their mistakes on? What kind of shit is his brain made of? What does he think if his human partners didn’t doubt him the he would be safe?”
“He has total faith in illusions after all. They are living an illusion, but they still don’t get it.”
“SO, he is an overconfident one, huh. Then we will use that against him. No matter what, I will not let him leave my home after playing with us like that.”
“Minie, stop being reckless! We don’t have time for this shit! We can’t kill anyone or we’ll risk our future!”
“Ugh, do you think we’ll have any future if we don’t kill him? Didn’t he say everyone will die, that he would kill everyone? Now tell me, if he could kill members of his own race, then we are just some liabilities, monsters, who would care even if we did die or not?”
Shit, she really is right. If we don’t kill him, then there is high possibility that after he kills his team members; whom he easily can with his illusions, his next target would certainly be us.
“But Minie, we can’t directly kill him. We need to find a way for his team to kill him. That would certainly help us survive and even take the blame away from our heads.”
She heard me say that and her spirit jumped slightly with excitement. I don’t know what kind of an idea formed in her head, but without even talking, telling or consulting with me, she moved.
She moved and flew out from our room. While she did that, the adventurers stood up and started walking towards the tunnel.
She flew and waited for an opportunity to do something.
“What are you going to do?” I asked her.
But instead of answering, she pointed toward the knight whose armor was not so shining anymore.
The fire mage used a spell and created a dome of light surrounding all of them inside it, creating a light room that was enough to provide ninety meters of ‘No Attack Zone’. Well, not like we had anything to attack them with.
Then I saw the knight daydreaming and getting left behind, giving an excellent opportunity to Minie, to do whatever that she wanted to do.
I just hoped that she wouldn’t end up killing him in order to release her stress. Not like she could, but unlike what I expected she played with him a little. Frightened him by flying close and then moving away, trying to make his vigilance slip. And then she created an opportunity and wrote something on the ground.
“Illusion” is what she wrote. Do I need to ask her why she wrote that? No, I already understand what she wanted to achieve by doing that.
She planted a seed of doubt in his heart by giving him information that he didn’t have.
“Will it work?” I asked her while I kept on looking at them.
“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. We’ll see when the time comes.”
Then she looked at them walking into the queen room that is also our room and disappearing into the darkness. Well, not for me, I could still see tiny balls of different colored lights, walking away.
Minie went past them to the core crystal and because I had no more scouting to do, I also shifted my presence and went back to my own crystal body.
We waited for them to come and they did, though their arrival was very stressing for us. They entered the room and slowly walked towards us.
They were getting closer and closer to us as they kept on stepping forward. Then something funny happened. They finally saw our Queen. Their faces contorted and their mouths gaped open and even their eyes bulged out.
Well, I wanted to laugh out loud, but our condition and the time was not so great that I could leisurely laugh at the face of… death.
Well, there is one more reason for why I couldn’t laugh. Though our queen looks like a heavy, all encompassing monster, but we know the truth. She is more like our mascot than our keeper.
I and Minie, we both knew that she had no means to harm these ‘B Rankers’. How would she harm them, with her pole like legs or her steel like hair? It was impossible for her to save us and I also gave no pressure to her. So when they finally got near us, I let the queen to go and rampage.
The thing is I really didn’t expect anything from her. I thought she would at most attacks with some fireballs and if they got near her, she would retaliate with her spear like legs, but what happened surpassed all of mine and Minie’s expectations.
She exploded all of our hopes; No, not our hope to survive this mess, but to let them leave with their bodies intact and unharmed. When she attacked it felt like she was trying to playing catch with children who hadn’t even learned to walk yet.
She moved at a blinding speed, that we didn’t even know she could run in and bitch slapped the knight and the Earth mage who were trying to create some kind of a defensive shell to protect themselves from the queens attack. What happened to them, I didn’t care because her onslaught had just started.