“Have you ever destroyed a dungeon before?” Jack asked in the general direction that he thought Kai was in.

“Yes. I destroy every dungeon I come across.” The voice came from behind him, Jack didn’t even bother to look. Instead, he kept his eyes on the budding wolf drone in front of him. Besides, Kai was probably way too far back for him to see through the fog.

The wolf continued its aggressive attack, lunging for his right leg. While normally he would dodge to the side or counter it with an attack, Jack instead blocked the attack with his pole and then pushed the wolf back a few feet.

**Skill Up** The Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod Level 3

This training session had only been going for fifteen minutes and he was already back to level three in his staff skill. He knew you were supposed to level up a skill much faster after you reset it, but this was just ridiculous. The training from Kai had to be helping with his leveling speed.

The wolf attacked again, this time jumping forward, aiming straight for his throat. Every instinct he had was telling him to dodge to the side, but he suppressed those urges and swiped the wolf out of the air.

An annoyed click came from the fog, this time to his left. “That was an attack. You are wasting too much energy knocking it to the side. You should use its momentum to redirect it to pass by you harmlessly.”

When Jack told Kai that he would be resetting his skill, the birdman launched into his criticisms of Jack’s technique with the staff. Primarily, he chastised Jack for only making decent use of its offensive potential while ignoring its defensive uses.

So instead of leaving the dungeon today, Kai was following him around and giving him training advice.

Currently, he was supposed to fight the drone without moving his feet, making him rely on his staff for defense as opposed to just dodging as he usually did. But, since Jack could easily kill the dumb drones, Kai also said he couldn’t attack and only defend for the first half-hour.

Blocking another attack, Jack continued his line of questioning. “So what happens when you destroy one?”

“After collecting the bounty of the dungeon, you must sever its lifelines. That will give you two hours to vacate the dungeon before it collapses. Once it does, you receive experience and a portion of a skill token.”

“Wait, what?” Jack exclaimed. “I thought you said they were really rare.” He was so thrown off by the new information that he completely messed up his block of the wolf’s jump attack.

The full weight of the two hundred pound canine hitting his chest was more than enough to knock him off his feet and onto his back. Dropping his weapon in the fall, Jack grabbed the wolf, holding it back from biting his throat. Its claws dug into his chest as the wolf tried to sink its teeth into him.

Manipulating his hair, Jack used the same trick that he used against the spell seeker. He had the end of his braid go straight into the wolf’s mouth and down its throat, blocking its airway.

While it tried to bite through his hair with very little success, the drone didn’t have the reaction Jack thought it would. It wasn’t choking. It wasn’t gagging. Did this thing not need to breathe?

Since the wolf couldn’t do too much damage to him at the moment, besides the occasional deep scratch from its claws, Jack decided this was the perfect time to try something he’d been working on.

Pressing the tips of his hair against the soft flesh inside its mouth, they slowly wormed their way into its skin. Once they were about a quarter into its skin, he activated Blood Drain.

Blood filled the drone’s mouth, mixed with small amounts of yellow ichor. Gradually it became more ichor than blood, until there were just faint traces of blood in the yellow liquid. He kept his head to the side to avoid it dripping on his face. It took a full five minutes, but eventually, the wolf went limp.

Your party has slain a Wolf Budding Titan Drone Level: 9

Your contribution 100%

You are awarded 16 Experience. **Skill Up** Blood Drain Level 4

Jack pushed the wolf off of him and sat up. The sounds and hunger pain coming from his stomach informed him he may have gone a little overboard trying to kill the wolf, only using the skill.

Kai emerged from the fog, followed by Lucy. “You were right, that is an interesting combination of skills. I do not believe it is a viable strategy in battle though.”

“Eh, probably not, but I’m mostly interested in seeing if Blood Drain will let me drain health too, eventually. Plus, come on, you have to admit that was cool.”

Lucy let out a squeak and a flash of blue.

“See, Lucy agrees.” Summoning his inventory, Jack pulled out a knife and a calorie bar. Using the knife, he cut off all the bloody hair. With how fast his hair regenerated, he was more than happy to skip cleaning it.

“So you were saying that a dungeon can give you a skill token? I thought you said tokens were really rare.”

Walking up to the wolf, Kai inspected its mouth. “I also said dungeons were a rare find.”

“Yeah, hopefully they aren’t as rare as you think, just hard to find,” Jack said with a mouth half full of calorie bar. He only had a few of the bars left, but he found they really helped with the hunger pains Blood Drain gave him. “So, how do you get a portion of a token?”

While slicing open the wolf, Kai answered, “Instead of a whole coin, a smaller portion appears. It depends on how many people are in your party. Unless you clear the dungeon by yourself, then you get a whole coin.”

“Well, that changes things. I was planning my build based on the fact that I would only get a coin every five levels. So I was just going to put them all into Mimicry, but if I can farm them, that gives me a lot more room to play with. How much do you get with a party of three or four?”

Kai stopped inspecting the wolf’s body, “parties of two or three get half a token each. I have not seen these drones eat anything and they do not appear to need to breathe. I don’t think they even need their blood. The only reason this one died was it lost too much of this yellow fluid.”

Swallowing the last bit of his bar, “Yeah, I noticed that too. You can also kill them just by ripping out the roots of the vine, but it is really difficult to do.” When he went to place the wrapper in his inventory, he paused when he noticed something strange.

The text on the wrapper was written in English and again in Spanish, but as he looked at it, the Spanish part seemed to shift into English. That made it so both parts were written in English.

His first thought was that the language translation ability was the cause, but it never did that before. Back in the Spiders Den, when he was taking an inventory of his medical supplies, he read the instructions on how to use each supply. A few of them were written in multiple languages. He would have noticed if the language translated then. So why did it now?

After going through all the possible causes, he narrowed it to one. The evolution of Researching; Ancient Knowledge. He never found out what it did, so maybe it translated text? The name follows that idea, finding an old tome in a forgotten language, that would be ancient knowledge. Is English a dead language now? He’d have to file all of that away for later.

Jack grabbed his staff and stood up. “Ok ready for the next fight.”

Slimy. His entire body was slimy.

With Kai there as a safeguard, he was able to train way harder than he had been able to before. Usually after fighting Jack would rest a little to recover stamina and any lost health, but with Kai there, he didn’t need to be so cautious.

Well, it was less that he didn’t need to and more that Kai wouldn’t let him rest. He said that you can’t always fight in peak condition, so you must train yourself to fight in all situations. Low health. Low stamina. With only one arm or leg. All of this without the help of Lucy; he had her also fighting by herself.

Since he was still building his tolerance to the boss’s more powerful ichor, Kai had him battling drones with a leg or arm paralyzed. This last fight was with both an arm and leg out of commission.

Trying to balance on one leg while swinging his staff around was not an easy task.

His body was covered in cuts and minor bruises. Also slime, so much slime.

Because the training was so exhausting, he really built up a sweat, especially during the last dozen fights. With his Mucus Shield skill, sweat meant slime.

On the bright side, he had a great feel for the benefits of the skill. Much like Impact Resistance, it cushioned blows from enemies. Not that it could compete with the resistance skill, but there was a noticeable difference when he was or wasn’t coated in mucus.

Another benefit was it helped reduce his bleeding, almost like a liquid bandage.

It also, of course, makes him slippery and hard to grapple. A blooming drone was able to get its vine wrapped around him one time since he was bouncing around on one leg. Fortunately, though, the mucus let him slide out of its grip easily.

If he angled himself correctly, he could make a drones attack almost slide off of him, only scraping off a small layer of slime.

The only bad thing about the skill was the skin-crawling feeling of being coated in a wet, gooey substance.

Sometime during the fight, he saw the notification. Before getting to it, he went to find Kai and check on Lucy.

“How’s she doing?”

Kai’s eyes were scanning the area that Lucy was fighting. “Very well. There are three drones and she is avoiding their attacks with minimal effort.”

Listening closely, he could hear the sounds of the drones trying to catch her. “So did she just poison them at the beginning and start kiting them?”

A click of agreement was Kai’s response.

Since her last molting, they had noticed a significant increase in the potency of her venom. It might take a lot longer, but now a single bite would take down most drones unless it was a boar or a bear.

Much like how Jack reset his staff skill that morning, he reset Lucy’s Hydraulic Assist as well. That was why most of her training that day had been focused on her actively avoiding attacks. Hopefully, she would get back to level five by the end of that fight.

Since it looked like it would be a while until she was done, Jack went into his notifications.

**Skills up** Impact Resistance Level 8 Identify Level 6 (24) The Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod Level 5 Mucus Shield Level 5 Mucus Shield has reached level 5 and is now able to be evolved. Level 5 is a free evolution and does not require a skill evolution token. Would you like to Evolve this skill? Yes No

“I guess Mucus Shield first, then.”

**Alert** New Skill Evolution Available Choose one Poison Secretion Requirement (Skill) Poison Resistance with (Evolution) Tolerance.

Near or full immunity to a poison. Oxygen Repository Oasis

Right off the bat Poison Secretion jumped out at him. This is the first time he had an evolution have another different skill as a requirement. Not only that, but it also required that skill to have a specific evolution. With the last requirement being immunity to a poison, he had a decent idea of what the evolution did.

He could potentially produce his own version of the corpse titan’s ichor, or hopefully at least a decent knock off. Holding back his excitement about gaining a poison of his own, he looked at his other options.

Oxygen repository. Definitely a way to hold his breath for large amounts of time. Unless he was planning on spending a bunch of time in the water, it wasn’t that useful to him.

Oasis, that was definitely a cool name for an evolution. His best guess was it was a way to store water. Maybe let him travel through a desert as his own personal oasis.

Informing Kai of his options, he also agreed that Poison Secretion was the superior choice. Just as he was about to click his choice, an idea popped into his head.

So far, they had very few ideas about how Jack could kill the boss alone, and none of them made it so he could learn its skill. His gut told him he had to see where it absorbed the vitality out of the vines.

When they had discussed how to do that, Jack brought up the idea of potentially going inside of it while it was still alive.

Kai had immediately dismissed the idea, saying there was no air inside of it and he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

Turning to the birdman Jack asked, “If I didn’t have to worry about air, do you think I could survive inside the boss, maybe even kill it?”

Kai tilted his head and thought for a minute. “There is a possibility, yes. It is a plant so it might not have any way to defend itself from the inside, especially considering it only swallows paralyzed prey.”

As much as he wanted his own poison, getting the boss’s skill was his first priority, and Oxygen Repository just might be the key. Plus, he could always reset the skill and get it later.

**Alert** Mucus Shield has gained the evolution Oxygen Repository