They finally reached the dungeon, tucked between a couple trees, its faint shimmer barely visible.

Destruction Dungeon: Level 1

The dungeon provided no threat to them at their current level.

Between their advanced abilities and bigger team, they cut through the gremlins guarding it without difficulty. Gordon leveled back to 3, while Levi, Skarm, and Centoo were high enough level not to gain more than minimal returns from these basic enemies.

The boss was another ogre this time.

Levi went straight in with his sword, Beast Bite chomping chunks off the boss's health at a steady rate as he danced away, evading the big clumsy thing's swings of retaliation. Centoo and Skarm circled around in careful strafing runs, slashing out from behind and dropping its health still further. Gordon and Flomper worked to distract and trip up the ogre, Flomper attacking its feet and ankles, while Gordon wielded his greatsword to great effect.

It still took a few minutes to whittle down the boss's unreasonable quantity of health, but it was far from the desperate struggle Levi had experienced his first day.

"Hold off for a minute," Levi said. "I want to try taming it."

He'd never had success taming a + creature before, but he'd increased in threshold recently. It might be that having a whole progression level on the boss would break through its resistance.

RESISTED RESISTED

Nope. Still nothing.

Once he'd fully exhausted his stamina in the attempts, and taken a few heavy hits in the process, he reluctantly beheaded it.

"I guess Dismay really is the only option there."

"What's that?"

Levi hadn't realized he spoke aloud, but he turned to Gordon as a new possibility opened up. "One of the available Tamer threshold abilities, Dismay, can decrease resistance to the Tame power, at the cost of increasing the target's health. It might be worth grabbing when you hit the threshold. Then we could bring guys like this in sooner than if we wait until I can evolve to Summoner."

If he assumed bosses had a flat 100% resistance to being subjugated, then using Dismay once would bring that down to 95%, after which they'd need to again fight the opponent back down into the taming range before trying again.

He hadn't unlocked Dismay at his first threshold, since at the time his biggest holdup was the limited number of minions. He still wanted to max Pack Leader, quantity was going to be essential. But if Gordon could grab Dismay at his first threshold, that would increase their options significantly.

"Where do I find that?"

Levi walked him through accessing his Tamer upgrade options, though they wouldn't be visible yet until he hit his threshold. "You don't have to decide now, but it's worth keeping in mind."

"How long do you think we have until I can upgrade?"

“Shouldn’t be too long. Five, seven dungeons at most. So another few days.”

“I still can’t quite believe we’re talking about levels and skill upgrades like this is normal. Shit, man, this is insane.”

Levi grunted noncommittally.

They went to collect their rewards from the treasure room. This time there were only two items, but still better than he’d expected. After so long getting only ingredients and potions it was nice to get so many proper items.

Shortbow (Manabow, Standard)

Abilities: (Insert power stone)

Power stone: 0/1

Upgrade Slots: 0

Sheath (Enhancement, Standard) Active Power: (none)

Power stone: 0/1

“No sword?” Gordon asked, peering at the empty sheath. “What’s the use of it, then?”

“It could be very useful once I can find someone to create the tracings.”

“What’s it go to?”

“Anything. Like my storage belt pockets, it can adapt its shape and size to whatever you put in it.” Levi demonstrated, sliding first his shortsword, then Gordon’s greatsword into the sheath, which fit them each perfectly.

“So it’s good if you lose your sheath.”

“More than that.” Levi turned it over and pointed to the power stone socket at its point. “Once it’s traced for a proper enhancement, it’ll add its power to any weapon you store in it. It works a bit differently than regular manablades, so it’s a handy secondary effect to have on hand.”

The best part about sheath-based abilities was that, unlike the active manablade powers that required constant upkeep, they could be charged well in advance without any in-combat expenditure. The downside was that they only lasted so long, and couldn’t really be turned off or conserved. Once they were spent, they were spent, and it would require another long period of storing the blade in the sheath to build it up again.

Levi had used sheaths with advanced powers in the past, but he tried not to rely on them. The last thing you wanted was to be counting on a power that ran out mid-fight. Better to stack Psyche for a high mana regen on yourself and keep powering your swords nonstop.

“What kind of secondary effect?”

“Same as anything - it depends on the tracing and on the powerstone. It could be anything from a sharper edge or longer blade to something like Beast Bite or Stone Shot.”

He slid the new manabow inside for safekeeping, the sheath adapting itself smoothly to the shape, then handed both to Gordon. “You won’t be able to fire it without arrows until we find a power stone for it, but it’s a good idea to have it on hand anyway.”

“Can we stop at a store and buy some arrows?”

“They won’t be effective against stronger monsters,” Levi warned.

“But will they be effective now?”

“Less than proper ones from a dungeon.”

“We don’t have proper ones from a dungeon. And quite honestly, I’d be a lot more comfortable shooting from a distance than getting up close and personal.”

Levi shrugged. “I won’t try to stop you, just know that they’ll be obsolete in a few days.”

“That is fine with me.”

Levi didn’t want to get in the habit of relying on things that would become ineffective in the long term, but as long as he was here to watch Gordon’s back it wouldn’t hurt anything for the man to equip himself however he saw fit.

He still remembered a story from the first timeline, when a group of hunters had stumbled upon a dungeon. They’d gone in, armed and ready, careful and precise, cleared it in record time and came back again the next day for more. And again the day after that. Until the dungeon outleveled their bullets, and all but one of them was killed in a simple fight against creatures they could have defeated easily if they’d been relying on the mana weapons they’d been given instead of sticking to what they thought would work.

It was the same against demons; conventional weaponry would be minimally effective at first, leading to too many people believing it would always remain so.

Better for everyone to get into the habit of using mana weapons exclusively as quickly as possible. But he could make an exception for Gordon.

While Gordon went shopping, Levi added that detail to a header banner and, after a few searches to figure out the coding, attached it to the top of every monster page.

Warning! Once this creature passes level 5, conventional non-dungeon weapons will begin to lose effectiveness. Anyone relying on unpowered weapons should upgrade before facing anything level 5 or above.

He saw quite a few discussions had been started regarding his additions. Several pages had been reverted, citing lack of evidence, and his page for the upcoming demon invasion ‘event’ had been deleted entirely.

It seemed even in the gamer circles it wasn’t going to be easy to get word out. He tried to think of a better way to present it. Could he call it a prophecy? Say he’d found it carved on the wall of a dungeon? He didn’t remember the details of what he’d written the first time, and hadn’t thought to save a copy in case of something like this happening.

Though it grated on him as a tedious waste of time, he went back through every page he’d updated and saved a local copy so this wouldn’t happen again, then went about revising the reverted pages in a way to make it sound more in line with the existing tone of the wiki pages. It felt wrong to dumb down his complete descriptions of the higher level versions of everything, but apparently they assumed any dungeon of that level wouldn’t have escaped their notice and that he must be making stuff up.

At least they didn’t do away with his stat blocks for the creatures he’d learned details on after taming them. His gremlin advancement graphs remained intact, and people had even begun making guesses for other creatures based on his template.

The Tamer page, though... it had been vandalized, then tagged with an 'unconfirmed' but not deleted. People were speculating and arguing over its validity, while others added completely frivolous things to it as though they thought the whole thing was a joke.

LarekX: I know this all seems like a fantasy, but that doesn't mean you can turn real life into pokemon.

DunilRegon: I WILL RIDE A DRAGON AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME!

Levi did his best to tidy things up, but didn't have much hope of it staying that way.