Daily Life in a Dungeon Part 2

It’s been about 2 weeks since last time, and about 4 weeks since the start of the apocalypse. Throughout this time, I’ve devoted myself to getting stronger.

Suffice to say, my daily life has become somewhat repetitive and monotonous.

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My day starts of at about 2 AM. While I do wake up this early in the morning, truth be told, I don’t do anything for 4 more hours except sit there and watch the door. You see, I have watch duty. Rotating who gets to sleep and who stays up has become sort of routine at this point. It’s not like I have a problem with it, after all, in a hellhole like this dungeon, safety is an immediate priority, but I’d like to atleast be able to complain about my time frame.

Anyways, after 4 hours pass by uneventfully, and the first wisps of light start seeping through, that’s when my real day begins.

My first task of the day is to wake the others up.

This sounds like a relatively simple task at first glance, but when you put into consideration , who I’m trying to wake up, then the task becomes that much more difficult.

Honestly speaking, all three of these girls are really heavy sleepers. While some days are better than most, a few times I had to resort to using Cielle’s [Dark Gemini] in order to wake them. Fun fact, Cielle suffers the effects of her skill just like everybody else if she’s careless and unaware.

Today seems to be a particularly difficult morning. Despite my incessant shaking, shaking hard enough to rustle their clothing and expose a fair amound of skin, they still did not wake up. A floaty expression floated upon each of their faces as they mumbled nothings and incoherences. Their shut eyes and terrible posterior expressed just how deeply asleep these girls were.

Looking over at their peaceful faces, I couldn’t help but let out a tired sigh.

… Well, it's not like I don’t understand though. Lately, Cher, Hina, and Cielle each spend their days either monster hunting, or “stat” training, so it’s understandable why they’d value what little sleep they actually get these days... Having a schedule busier than during their school days must be tough indeed…

On another note, I confirmed earlier that it was possible to train stats outside of leveling up. Similar to how new stats, such as [Resistance] or [Accuracy], can be acquired by doing certain things, stats can also increase through repetitive action. Apparently, Hina and the others all increased their stats either during battle or when they were practicing their mana.

The rate at which a person’s stats grow differs, depending on either the individual themselves and on the specific stat. It’s sort of like an afinity. While one person can increase intelligence faster than another, their growth in agility might be relatively slow. It’s that sort of thing- you know, talent.

Hina’s intelligence, wisdom, and magical accuracy all increase pretty rapidly. The same can be said about Cielle, with the exception that her [magical endurance] has the greatest growth rate out of all her stats. Cher’s growth is a bit below theirs - or should I say, she’s a bit normal. I have a feeling that those sisters are a bit too abnormal when it comes to growth rate.

At either rate, Cher’s agility, defense, and physical resistance stat have all experienced growth. She also acquired [Magic resistance] sometime last week after a bit of training with Cielle and Hina.

Like that, my companions are getting stronger as the days go by.

And if you’re curious, no, not once have my stats increased outside of leveling up and Elite Monster subjugation. It’s a bit abnormal, and truthfully, it made me a bit nervous. I mean, if we’re talking about pure physical activity, then I do way more than Cher, but in the end, only her stats are rising, while mine stay the same.

What’s with this level of treatment? Isn’t the system treating me a bit unfairly? I even went out of my way to do pure physical exercise, like sprinting, or lifting makeshift weights, but in the end, not a single stat rose.

I inwardly complained and outwardly cursed the system after I discovered this.

Well, I despaired for a few days, but I eventually got over it. Besides, it’s useless to just mope around. If I can’t increase my stats like the others, then I’ll just find some other method. There are plenty of monsters for me to kill in this dungeon, after all.

After everyone wakes up, we eat a simple breakfast. The importance of food is important in this new world. Not only does the body regularly need energy in order to maintain physical activity, through the influence of the system, our digestion and metabolism can’t even compare to what they were before the apocalypse. That’s why it’s important to start the day off with a full stomach.

Usually, our meals consisted of either canned goods or fried meat. Despie the limited ingredients, it’s a surprisingly delicious meal, especially with the addition of one magic ingredient: Rice. After all, breakfast is best enjoyed with rice.

Thanks to that magic ingredient, everyday, I eat it with excess vigor.

Today too, there is no change in my appetite.

After the meal comes the time when we usually split up. Unlike before, my schedule isn’t the same as the girls anymore. In order to maximize our individual growth, we each do different things throughout the day.

Although once every three days, we do go and spend the morning together hunting down boars to increase our food supply, but suffice to say, it isn’t one of those days today.

Today, I head out first. While the others are going off to go increase their level, I’m going somewhere else.

It takes me about 45 minutes - walking through deserted hallways, and crawling through musky ventilation shafts, but eventually I get there.

Before my eyes is a familiar room. The woodshop located in the interior 1st floor of the East building. This is where I make weapons, and experiment with my crafting skill.

At first, I could only produce whittled down bokens made from the collected Cyclops’ club, but after 2 weeks of nonstop experimentin and crafting, it's natural that I’d get better at it. Even my skill, [All Purpose Crafting] which grew to beginner level 5, reflects that.

Now I can create shin guards, shields, and gauntlets. Naturally, all of these are made out of wood from the Cyclops club. I worry that I’ll eventually run out of wood, but I can’t really afford to be stingy.

Throughout these 2 weeks, I’ve also experimented with crafting other items, mainly, accessories. Things like rings, jewelry, bracelets, the typical things one would expect to find in an RPG. Surprisingly enough though, I was unable to do that. Apparently, it isn’t just the simple process of carving out something that had a vaguely “ring” - like shape and attaching some miscellaneous trinket to it. In the end, I wasn’t able to create a single useful accessory. I believe this is due to how low-level my crafting skill is, so, for now, it might just be something to look forward to in the future.

While there were failures, there were also some successes. Mainly, I learned how to create armor and clothing.

Of course, it's just leather armor, working with metal and steel is still beyond me, but still, it was an incredibly difficult process, especially for some newbielike me. First, I had to learn how to properly skin and tan the hides of the boars through instructional books I found in the library. After that, the process of learning how to properly create leather armor was a trial whose difficulty was on a whole ‘nother level. As one would expect, there were a lot of failures, and it was a road paved with blood, tears, and sweat, but somehow or another, I managed.

As a result, I gained the sub skill [Leatherworking].

As for clothing, the [Tailoring] skill was surprisingly easy to acquire. Using a sewing kit I found in a clubroom close by, it was a simple matter of dismantling and restitching the fabric into useable pieces of clothing. I also tried adding some Boar leather into my stitching but that merely turned it into some downgraded leather armor.

Since it had worse stats than the regular leather armor I could craft, it ended up being useless and was labeled as a “failure”.

Apart from the failed Boar leather clothig, the successfully created cloth was just an ordinary piece of cloth with minor stat bonuses such as +2 strength, or +1 defense. The low value bonuses weren’t much of an issue though, due to the existence of [familiarity]. Although, strangely enough, the familiarity bonus only went up to +10 when it came to clothing, but still, it was beneficial for me.

For the first week, I created clothing like crazy. As a result, I ended up making an excess amount before I even noticed what happened. Of course, I created the several clothes with the original intention of increasing my stats. “Cheat”-like actions such as wearing several T-shirts at the same time in order to stack the stat boosts were considerably tempting after all.

In the end though, that wasn’t possible. Only 1 bonus from the same article of clothing would apply. This crushed my hopes of stacked benefits, but it was still possible to attain several stat boosts if I wore different pieces of clothing at the same time. The bonuses from my pants, t-shirt, jacket, socks, even underwear, by wearing a full set of newly tailored clothes, my stats greatly increased. And naturally, if I wore leather armor or other armaments like shin guards and gauntlets, then their effects will activate as well.

I also learned later that the bonuses given by the created clothes only applied to me, so unfortunately, mass producing t-shirts and linen pants was a useless waste of energy.

Today I plan on making leather armor.

Using the leather I previously skinned off of the boars, I began working. A combination of [Leatherworking] and [Tailoring] is needed in order to create a successful piece of armor. After 4 hours, I was able to make 2 decent pieces of leather chest guards.

Boar Leather Armor

Leather armor crafted by an amateur craftsman using the hide of a Lesser Tusk Boar.

+10 (50)Defense

+5 (50) Agility

Durability: 20/20

Equip Skill Bonus

+10 Defense

Familiarity: 50

Level Requirement: 10 [Crafter Exempted]

Looking over it, I confirmed that this leather piece of equipment was identical to the ones I created before.

From an aethetic perspective, the armor was ugly. While the armor itself looked a bit funky, with holes everywhere, and loose string attached at the seams, giving it an almost incomplete appearance, the status window itself already confirmed its usefulness. To another person, it was a good piece of equipment that boosted both Defense and Agility, but to me, it was something completely broken. A superior piece of equipment that a person at my level shouldn’t be able to acquire.

All of this was thanks to the Familiarity aspect of my skill though.

After successfully creating the armor, I began to carefully scrutinize it with an expeirenced glare.

While in general, the Boar Leather Armor wasn’t as good as the previous Cyclops Replica Torso Armor I crafted before, it was perfect for me, considering it also boosted my agility stat.

Throughout these 2 weeks, I’ve already equipped Cielle with leather armor, while the other two had the Cyclops Replica Torso Armors I gave them a while back. In addition, with these two newly crafted pieces of equipment, I would finally be able to equip armor onto all of the President’s party.

Previously, out of their party of 5, three of them were currently wearing Leather armor. The addition of the two pieces of leather before me would complete the set. In addition to the armor, I also gave them weapons, which included 2 sets of Customized Cyclops Clubs (for that brown haired girl and the teacher, 2 pieces of poorly fashioned Cyclops wood slingshots (for the twins), as well as a Customized Cyclops Club with a sharpened edge for the President.

After receiving weapons with actual stat bonuses… well, you can imagine their reaction.

Next time, I plan on making shields for their vanguards. While their reactions this time around will probably be less surprised, I still can’t help but hold a faint bit of eagerness for the future to come.

After I stuffed the leather piece of armor into my backpack, I began heading back. The current time was about 10:30 AM, and I still had a whole day ahead of me.

***

Right now, I’m currently in a familiar Chemistry Classroom within the Old School Building. As for why I’m here, it's obviously to experiment.

On the black surface of a clattered lab table, a collection of varying ingredients were spread about.

A few of these ingredients were common chemicals and acids normally available within a High School Chemistry Classroom. In contrast, the rest of the ingredients were a bit more… outlandish. To sum it up, they were corpses, or at least, parts of corpses.

Things like the large intestine of a werewolf, the heart of a boar, decayed goblin muscle, they were an amalgamation of the body parts that the monsters I’ve hunted thus far possessed. Most of them were old and started to smell, but there was nothing I could really do about it but suck up the putrid stench of decaying bodies. It was a necessary sacrifice for the future after all.

Also, aside from the monster corpses, There were also pieces of human corpses gathered on the table. These were acquired from the several dead bodies found in the halls.

“...”

Staring at all this with a tired expression, I couldn’t help but sigh out. With well accustomed motions, I once again began “experimenting”.

…

Approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes later, the end result was failure.

There wasn’t any outlandish explosion, nor a wisp of discolored smoke, rather, the plain and simple thing was, nothing happened. Like always, today too, I did not acquire the [Alchemy] sub-skill.

Throughout these 2 weeks, I’ve been mixing all these varying ingredients, all the while looking out for any sort of reaction. Each time I combined a set of ingredients, I’d make sure to use [identify] to see whether or not it had any effect. In the end though, it all resulted in failure.

There was no reaction from my skill, nor any physical changes. Making regular chemical reactions also did not result in a sub skill, so that was a pointless act. I could probably create something useful purely out of the dwindling chemicals available to me, but as expected, I don’t have enough prior knowledge in the subject. After all, I took Biology and not Chemistry, this was completely outside of my area of expertise.

In the end, the day was once again a failure among failures. At this point, I’ve probably tried an endless combination of ingredients, all to no avail… As expected, I probably need something like a recipe book in order to successfully do Alchemy.

For now though, such a thing was unavailable to me, so with a heavy sigh I quickly began cleaning up the mess I created and prepared to leave.

Now that I’ve dealt with the work heavy matters on my to-do list, the rest of the day was relatively straightforward. From now up until night, it would be simple level grinding.

Three ways I did this. First, I party with the President’s group, then I’d party with Hina and the others, and lastly, I’d go hunting alone. There were varying reasons why I repeated the same task three times, but in the end, I didn’t think much about it right now. After all, I’ve been doing the same thing for close to two weeks now, so there really wasn’t that much to think about.

I casually rolled my shoulders around, as I made my way towards the Library. With the time still barely past noon, and my day still fully ahead of me, I could merely let out a long drawn out sigh as I tiredly gazed out the window, my feet moving forward throughout the whole process .

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Author's Note: Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed this chapter, or like this story in general, please rate and review. It motivates me.