The party entered the third floor without concern. Brandt and Jude had been in the Aqua Caverns a few times each. The river was a few hundred yards from the door. No enemies would attack until they reached the water.

Brandt had returned the torches to Orrin with another round of thanking him. Orrin was just glad Madi seemed to be back to normal. Though he did see her flinch a bit as the doors opened and light spilled into the safe room.

Orrin pulled up his [Map] and scanned ahead. He stopped walking at what he saw.

The path ahead was covered in randomly placed yellow squares. Red dots, showing the fish monsters underneath obviously, swarmed around each square.

“The ice is all a trap...” he realized, as he zoomed in and out, double-checking to confirm what his brain was telling him. “[Trap View] lets me see the path across. Hey! My [Map] is a cheat sheet!”

“What do you mean?” Brandt turned back from the water’s edge. Or the ice’s edge, Orrin thought.

“I see yellow squares across the river, with red dots circling each one.”

“That sounds like how they usually set up,” Jude said. “Where’s the closet one?”

Orrin pointed off to the side. The nearest yellow square was only ten feet past the shoreline. “Right there, ten feet in.”

Jude walked over and hit the ice with his hammer. Nothing happened.

“A little further, but that was almost the edge of-“

Jude struck again and the entire yellow section on Orrin’s [Map] blinked out. The ice shattered and fell into the rushing water of the river below. Jude made his way back with a giant grin on his face.

Daniel shook his head. “Damn it, Orrin. I wanted to kill some monsters.”

“We still can,” Orrin said. “Hell, we can clear the entire floor if we want. There’s a pretty rambling path if we do this...”

Orrin used his sword to draw a rough maze in the snow. He pointed out where each ‘trap’ of thin ice would be, and counted off the fish.

“There’s two to three fish on each square and I’m not going to sit here counting them all...but there’s at least a hundred or so.”

Brandt threw his hands in the air. “We can’t kill every monster in the whole dungeon. That’s not the point. We should just push ahead and bypass the entire floor.”

Madi crossed her arms over her chest. “Just because you hit level twenty, doesn’t mean the rest of us are satisfied. I seem to remember the whole point of this dungeon run was to get me safely away from the Wall.”

Brandt looked at Madi guiltily. “You did hear us talking then, huh?”

Madi walked through the group to stand right in front of Brandt, her small frame dwarfed by his armored mass. “Yes, I heard him. I heard you agreeing as well. I’m not a child, Sir Bennett. And you and my father better get that through your heads.”

Daniel stepped closer to Orrin. “Any idea what’s going on?”

“The young Lady obviously overheard our marching orders from her father,” Jude whispered. “You being the [Hero] and this whole Quest business is just an excuse to keep Madi away from a Horde attack.”

“But why?” Orrin asked, as Madi continued to poke her finger against Brandt and call him names. “He’s a Lord of the city. Couldn’t he just...lock her up or something if he didn’t want her fighting?”

Jude shook his head. “She’s an adult. She’s over level ten and she’s part of the Guild. If he tried something like that... well honestly I have no idea what the fallout would be, but it would be bad.”

Madi finished telling Brandt off and rejoined the rest of the party. She was breathing hard.

Brandt looked away for a minute and slowly moved closer to Orrin’s crudely drawn map. “We can probably get some fishing done, but only in spaces where we have enough room to move freely. Orrin, are there any large areas near the other side that seem good?”

Orrin took another look and picked a long stretch near the other side of the river that seemed a likely candidate. He nodded and drew it out on his snow map.

“Good.” Brandt seemed subdued, like a puppy that had been yelled at. “We will make our way across and then pull a fish or two out to kill.”

Crossing the river took twenty minutes. They had to go slowly, as the ice was still slick, but Jude complained the entire time.

“This is usually my favorite floor,” he grumbled. “I get to hit the ice with my hammer and if I can’t break it, it’s safe to go across.”

“You can still hit that section to your right,” Orrin said without looking up from his [Map]. “It should be thin and it doesn’t have any red dots around it right now.”

“It’s not the same,” Jude mumbled.

When they got to the other side, Orrin led them to a spot a few hundred yards further to the right of the original door entrance. The new door to the next safe room had appeared behind them as soon as Brandt’s foot had hit the riverbank.

“There are about ten yellow squares that should be only five or six feet wide in diameter from there to there.” He pointed.

“We’ll need to mark them off somehow,” Daniel glanced around. “I don’t want to go swimming in this cold.”

Orrin put his hand out and a sword of ice grew in his palm. “Leave that to me. I’ll stake it all out.”

Orrin’s idea would have been perfect. Except he couldn’t plunge the swords in the ice deep enough to stick. In the end, he had to enlist Jude’s help to hammer the ice of his sword handle, turning the entire endeavor into a construction exercise.

Jude on the other hand, loved using his hammer. “So, right beyond these swords will be the carp?”

“Yep. Actually all the hammering seems to be drawing even more over here, too,” Orrin answered after checking his [Map] again.

They spent ten minutes slowly and carefully marking a safe area. Then Brandt had the party line up.

“Frozen Carp are about the size of wagon wheel and weigh about two hundred pounds each. They will bite anything that touches the water, so make sure to wait for Jude or I to pull one out.”

“How will you do that?” Daniel had his old short sword out. He’d begged Orrin to increase his strength and pull out Gertrude, but Orrin had just ignored him until he went away.

“I’ll just put my hammer in the water and drag them out. Brandt can try fishing with a rope. Like he said, they bite down and don’t let go, so it’s actually really easy to drag them out of the water...as long as it’s not you they’re biting.” Jude answered with a twirl of his hammer.

“Could you use Madi’s spear?” Orrin asked. “Just retract it to make the magic do the work instead of hauling on two hundred pounds of fish?”

Madi smirked. “I can pull a fish out too then.”

“No,” Brandt said sternly. “I’ll use your spear to pull them out and then hand it back to you. Jude and I can just pull out a few at a time, while you three get your fill of monster kills. Then we can go rest. Safe and sound.”

Jude went first. He stepped just beyond Orrin’s ice sword and brought his hammer down in a double handed overhead swing. A perfect replica of the yellow trap on Orrin’s map exploded into small pieces of ice, swiftly carried away by the current. A dark blue fin crested the top of the water.

Jude lowered his hammer into the path of the fish.

Orrin had never been into fishing, but the thing that appeared did not look like what he’d thought a carp would look like. In fact, it looked more like a goldfish. A goldfish that had grown fifty times bigger, was dark blue, and had literal ice all over it. The carp’s mouth opened and teeth out of a horror movie appeared before it chomped down on Jude’s weapon.

“Got one!” Jude yelled in joy and pulled. He dug his heels in and walked backwards, dragging the fish out of the water. It stubbornly would not let go.

Once Jude cleared the row of ice swords, Orrin, Daniel, and Madi fell on it. Brandt had already told them the monsters were near immobile out of water, so they hacked and slashed away. Orrin had little trouble sticking the pointy end of his sword into the large fleshy fish.

After less than a minute, they killed the first monster of floor three.

Experience Gained: 30 XP

“Only thirty?” Daniel complained. “I need to hit a thousand to get to the next level. This is going to take forever.

“I need nearly three thousand more,” Madi chimed in. “I’m only halfway to the next level right now.”

Orrin saw the future slough of experience grinding and sighed internally. “I only need a few hundred to hit level ten.”

“How much?” Daniel turned and asked. Madi handed her spear to Brandt, as Jude sat on his heels and caught his breath.

“I’m at one seventy-five of nine hundred.”

Daniel looked at Madi, who nodded. She turned and yelled to Brandt. “We need to get about ten of these for just Orrin. He’s nearing level ten.

Brandt nodded back.

“All yours, buddy,” Daniel took a step back.

“Wait, what? I’m not taking all these kills myself.” Orrin tried to step back too. Daniel pushed him gently forward.

“You are the weakest link. Let’s see what level ten does for you.”

"But we can both do it," Orrin tried again. "You can't be too far off from what I need. We can just-"

Daniel shook his head. "It's time for you to catch up. You aren't technically supposed to be in here right?"

Orrin looked around. Jude and Madi were smiling at him.

“Traitors. You’re all traitors.”

It took five minutes for Orrin to do enough damage to kill a Frozen Carp on his own.

Experience Gained: 90 XP

By the time he killed seven more, he was out of breath, his ice swords had disappeared, and his arms felt heavy.

Experience Gained: 630 XP (90 XP x 7)

Orrin pulled up his status.

Orrin Utility Warder Level 9 (895/900)

“I only need one more, but I don’t need to do all the damage,” Orin shouted to the rest of the party. Brandt was taking a break and Jude was standing near the edge of the churning water.

Jude nodded and pulled another carp up. He dragged it back and waited. “Go ahead, hit it once.”

Orrin slashed the carp.

“Now back up,” Jude instructed.

Orrin moved back to the group, sitting along the edge of the frozen river.

Jude grunted and picked his hammer up. The fish was still latched to the head. As Jude straightened his arms, the fish came off the ground, rising slowly into the air, until it floated vertically above Jude’s head.

He let out a yell and brought the hammer down.

The fish exploded on impact.

Experience Gained: 45 XP

Level 10 Obtained!

+10 AP

A second box appeared under the first

Congratulations on obtaining Level 10!

10 Stat Points have been awarded.

Useable Stats for Utility Warder:

Strength

Constitution

Dexterity

Will

Intelligence

Holy shit, Orrin thought to himself. That’s just as many as Daniel!

A third box blinked to life under that one.

Quest Complete:

Obtain Level 10

Reward: [Hero Kit Level 2] Unavailable reward

Just the same as Brandt. I had kind of hoped tha-

Error

Quest Reward Unavailable

Debug

Debug

Error

Administrator Access Override

Error

Reward Runtime Error

Reward List Debug

Rebooting...

Select your reward_

What the fuck?