The tunnel started to open up, and I could practically feel the upcoming boss battle in my bones.

“This is it, boys,” I said, whispering to my familiars. “I wish you two agreed to stay outside. You realize if this kills me, you’re probably trapped in this dungeon for, like, ever, yeah?”

Treepo chittered–quietly–and Buda snorted softly.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I muttered.

It had taken far longer than I expected to get here, but now that I was here, there was no going back. I had a plan, more or less, which should work no matter what I was facing… more or less.

I took a deep breath. Here goes nothing.

Slow, quiet steps took me to the entrance of the cavern, and I peered in, sending my light high up to the top of the enormous underground space.

“Oh no,” I muttered.

It was a pegasus moose. A PegaMoose. Pegamüs?

That wasn’t what it was actually called, as I had appraised the one I had seen outside and learned that it was actually called an alcewing.

It was corrupted, of course, and enormous. Bigger than a full-grown elephant, easily, and with all the strength of a moose writ-large, no doubt.

Did that mean that the one I had seen in the forest was a Rank C beast? I was glad I didn’t fight it. I had mostly just been too in awe of the creature before it flew away.

It was a massive mercy that this one wouldn’t be able to fly, being in an underground cavern.

The corrupted beast’s wings were dark and wet looking, ugly things compared to the wings on the one I had seen outside. Its antlers were, unsurprisingly, the biometal that the dungeon liked so much on its corrupted beasts. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get that stuff to rust, so I wasn’t exactly sure what it was made of and I couldn’t get a sample with the dungeon eating all the corpses. All I knew was that I didn’t want it touching me, ever. So far I had avoided that, and I hoped to keep it that way.

Massive hooves that could clearly crush me to death shone metallic as well, and the creature was starting to snort and paw at the ground. It was a second small mercy that it wouldn’t be able to work up to a full charge at me in this space, but it probably didn’t need to. One wrong hit and I would be in huge trouble.

The beast was already active. There was no time to lose.

I leapt forward, immediately dropping my giant 6-point stone disc magic circle and pushing my entire and full magic pool into a purification spell.

My MP plummeted to 0, the gush of magic pouring out of me almost painful with the speed at which I channeled it into the spell. The alcewing started bucking, a surprising roar bellowing out from its mouth, and the giant stone disc shattered with the force of the spell.

Without pausing, I chugged the MP potion I had prepared from my inventory, although at my current level and at this potion strength it only recovered about half my total MP. Still, that was enough.

Rust poured from my inventory, swirling and striking out towards the alcewing’s eyes. I would need to get closer to hone my focus more directly, but if I could blind the beast, I would be in a much better position.

I raced forward, not directly at the beast but to its side, while it was distracted by the purification and rust. Leaping with all my strength at its leg, I stabbed into the flesh with my bowie, hoping against reason that the blade would hold.

The knife sunk in deep enough to carry my weight, but only just. That was when the alcewing started to leap and turn, which threw me off.

I needed to climb the beast, and had hoped I could use blades as handhelds to climb my way up. If that wasn’t going to work, I would have to go with plan B.

Pulling a prepared rope from my inventory, with a stone secured on the end, I whipped the end up and–guided by magic–sent the stone over the back of the large moose creature, pulling the stone all the way back under and through, whipping it around the rope into a quick knot.

It was a move I practiced on trees in the forest leading up to this, but required precision, control, and focus. It was much harder to do on the angry alcewing, but it worked well enough. I immediately started pulling myself up the rope, swinging wildly as the corrupted dungeon boss flailed from my rust.

As with the huge corrupted direfox, my only real hope against an enemy this big was weak spots like the spinal column and directly into the brain. I was absolutely not willing to take the draconewt route with a corrupted dungeon beast.

I carefully navigated up the beasts back towards the neck and head, looking for the right place to stick my sword in before I was thrown clear. The huge creature shifted, and before I could fall, I grabbed the metallic antler.

My hand seared cold, and I screamed.

I ripped my hand away, nearly falling, throwing myself flat against the coat of the beast and clinging with my good hand so as to not slide off.

What was that?

I looked at my hand, and it seemed fine, but it had been a pain that cut right through me. I shook my hand as feeling returned. I couldn’t tell if that had actually been cold, or just pure, agonizing nerve pain.

I shot fire at the antlers, seeing if they would melt, and the corrupted alcewing bucked again, but it didn’t seem like I was doing that much damage.

Back to the plan, then. The ear might be a good option. The canal was big enough that I could slide an arm into, though I would never because it was disgusting. Instead, I pulled a stone spear from my inventory and fired it inside, holding tight to the flesh of the ear.

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Not tight enough. The beast shook, whipping its head back and forth, and I was flung bodily against the cavern wall, the wind knocked out of me, then fell all the way to the floor with a heavy thud.

I groaned, aching, whipping up some healing magic to help me get back into the fight. The healing magic attracted the alcewing’s attention, though, and it stopped shaking and glared me down, then charged me in what little space was available. The charge would undoubtedly crush me into paste against the dungeon walls and floor.

Before it landed, Buda was racing past, and I reached out just in time to grab his wool and get dragged away, the alcewing crashing into the dungeon’s strange material, a loud thud echoing through the chamber.

I pulled myself atop Buda as he came around the alcewing’s side, and finished healing myself.

“Get me to the rope!”

Buda ran past the still-dangling rope, and I grabbed it as he passed through without me underneath the corrupted beast, and I climbed as fast as I could, still aching from the last throw.

I sidled up the back of the beast, my bowie in one hand and hunting knife in the other, stabbing in and pulling myself forward, occasionally waiting and holding on for dear life as the beast flailed. I had to get back to the ears. I needed something bigger to jam into the beast’s brain.

Once I got back to where I had been before I was thrown, I pulled the large stone arch I had used in the past to pin beasts in the jungle. I quickly manipulated it, turning it from an arch to a massive, pointed spike, and with the rest of my MP, I slammed it into the alcewing’s ear.

The beast went rigid, then dropped to the ground.

I threw myself from the beast when it fell, rolling away and spinning back to the beast, watching and waiting to see it die.

When it started to absorb into the floor, I took a breath, then winced. My sides weren’t fully healed.

I turned to see Buda and Treepo off to the side, the high treehopper chittering wildly and Buda snuffling happily.

“You saved my bacon, Buda,” I said, grimacing belatedly at the pig wordplay, but Buda didn’t care.

We had done it. We beat the Rank B dungeon.

It was time to see to our rewards.

* * *

After retrieving the dungeon core, which was about double the size of the Rank D dungeon core, we set up camp right in place to wait and see what, if anything, would grow in the location of the scar in the world once it sunk away to dissolve, or whatever it was dungeons did when they died.

It had only taken mere days for the skillfruit tree to grow in the jungle, so I wasn’t expecting we would have to wait long before something sprouted to study. After three days of sitting around and waiting with nothing growing, I started to second-guess myself.

Had I misunderstood where the skillfruit tree came from? It had grown exactly where the last dungeon was, and it definitely grew due to magical influence of some kind.

Frowning, I walked over the area the dungeon had been, now fully disappeared.

My ability to sense magic outside myself had been improving. It wasn’t a formal skill, more of a natural intuition or feeling. There were lots of parts of life in this world that my appraisal abilities didn’t reflect at all–for example, running speed or mathematical ability–and this magical intuition of mine seemed like something similar. I was sure it grew out of, in large part, my magic skills and practice with them, but I suspected it was something that just needed proper work, study, and practice, as opposed to something that was hackable with skills.

Closing my eyes, I could still feel the lingering presence of the weird dungeon magic. I had assumed that had been what caused the skillfruit tree to grow, initially. That didn’t actually make any sense though. Trees needed seeds to grow from.

I pulled the skillfruit pit out of my inventory, looking it over.

The skillfruit tree I got these fruits from was in the jungle, many months of travel south and west of here. It was an entirely different ecosystem. As I had rudely discovered when I tried to revisit the tree, there were also beasts in that ecosystem which seemed attracted to and hungry for the plant. I still had some shagloth meat in my inventory from that encounter.

I bounced the pit in my hand. It was a lot like a peach pit, only larger, the size of a large avocado pit.

If shagloths were native to the southern jungle and ate skillfruits, then there could be a seed bank in the jungle still that reacted when the dungeon dumped its magical energies after being defeated. Here, in this temperate forest, there might not be a similar seed bank. Without pits already waiting underground to grow, there wouldn’t be a tree. Maybe the dungeon didn’t spontaneously generate the tree, it influenced its growth.

Shrugging, I started to dig a hole, and dropped the pit into the dirt, covering it back up. For good measure, I pulled some water out of the atmosphere with 4-point magic and watered the disturbed soil to help things along. Then I sat back and watched.

Within an hour, and despite it being out of season, I saw the small sprout pushing out of the ground. I watched transfixed at the tree’s progress on fast forward, a living timelapse of plant potential as the sapling pulled in local residual magic and converted it into growth.

The Rank B dungeon was more powerful than the Rank D dungeon, so I decided to pull out another skillfruit and, lips puckered, I suffered through the sour flavor to gain another skill point so I could plant another pit nearby. It took a little longer to get growing, but soon enough it was pushing out of the ground as well, so I decided to try a third.

I still had 30 skillfruits in my inventory, and was prepared to suffer the mouth and stomach consequences of eating more to plant more pits, but the third pit’s growth was a lot slower and weaker, so I stopped.

By the next day, the first tree was fully grown and impressively large, and I saw the fruits starting to form. A little voice in my head wondered how they were growing without pollinators having time to work away at flowers–which I had barely even seen before they were growing fruit–but I had to assume that was just because of magical influence. Perhaps they were just aggressive and successful self-pollinating flowers.

I grew wary of what beasts might be attracted to the tree as the fruit started to appear fully formed. I didn’t really expect another shagloth to randomly appear in a completely different part of the world, but there could be some other local beast that would sense these and come to eat them.

“I’d really like to wait until these are fully ripe, in case they sweeten up, but we better start collecting those fruits,” I said to Treepo, who chittered and ran up the tree.

It took another two days for the final tree to finish growing, and it never got very big so it didn’t yield nearly as many skillfruits. Altogether, we harvested another 82 skillfruit, which brought my inventory total to 112.

Still not enough, I thought. Dungeons were challenging to clear and hard to find, and this method wouldn’t produce enough to really help other people if I had larger intentions than just growing stronger, myself.

Consuming all of them would let me quickly reach a double advanced skill, but the thought turned my stomach. That was a lot of really sour fruit. I would have to experiment with juicing them soon, but for now, I set the thoughts aside for later. I had some ideas, but I needed a safe space to experiment.

As far as skill points went, in addition to the 2 SP I gained from the fruit, I also had 45 SP from leveling up twice after killing the alcewing, a.k.a. the pegamüs. The rank B beast had given me a ton of experience, not unlike the draconewt. This battle had arguably been easier than my fight against the draconic beast, but the giant corrupted flying moose had actually been at a disadvantage being so large while indoors and grounded. A smaller, more agile beast would have been worse, in a lot of ways.

Outdoors, even the weaker, unevolved alcewing would probably be a bigger challenge if I decided to fight one. Just the thought of a rampaging moose flying through the air gave me the shivers. I would have to be a lot stronger before I could confidently fight strong, flight-capable foes.

I put 30 SP into 4-point magic to bring it halfway to double-advancement. The fact of the matter was that I still relied on it the most for combat and the quicker I advanced it again the better off I would be. I put the remaining 17 SP into 6-point magic with similar reasoning in mind. Healing, of course, was critical for me, but I was also using a lot of buffs and curses and wanted stronger purification for future dungeons, which I had no doubt I would be seeing in my future.