The stairs were steep, spiraling down into the earth in a clockwise corkscrew. After three rotations, I found myself at a landing. Just like the previous floor, this one appeared as a cave system lit with blue glowing mushrooms. I had been taking a break for an hour already in the boss room of the previous floor, and I knew that if I decided to stop here again, I would be too tired to keep going. I could tell how a dungeon-like this would be designed for multiple people. It was exhausting and dreary, and constantly being underground was starting to weigh on my mind and make me feel claustrophobic.

There was only one path ahead, so as I walked and checked the corridor for traps using my new ability, I made sure to formulate a plan to take the most advantage of my situation. I was stuck in a dungeon, that much was true, but I also had greatly increased experience and loot drops. That would not last forever. From what I could tell on the first floor, the biggest boon that I had was that by adventuring solo, my skills leveled up crazy fast. I would only get the skill experience at the end of the level, but that was only for my normal skills. I had a suspicion that my art skills would not work the same way.

While I could only level up the two arts by training them and internalizing their teachings, there was nothing that said I couldn’t do it while in combat. I wanted to get to the max level of claw techniques on this floor, and then I wanted to try and learn a bit of the sword. I needed more penetration if I wanted to take on heavily armored foes, and my claws, gauntlets, and boots just wouldn’t foot the bill. I went ahead and identified them again.

Initiate Zald Paladin Gauntlets - ERROR unarmed damage, +10% resistance to flame, requires 20 str, 20 agi (Heavy Armor)

Hardness: 2

Mana Conductivity: Minor

Initiate Zald Paladin Boots - ERROR unarmed damage, +10% resistance to flame, requires 20 str, 20 agi (Heavy Armor)

Harness: 2

Mana Conductivity: Minor

And that was that. Their hardness was 2, while the spider chitin had a hardness of 3. It was easy to understand that kangor was weaker than the spider chitin, therefore it was difficult for the metal to breakthrough. I would be fighting those big spiders again, and I needed an edge. Pun intended.

The two martial arts that I had were very universal. The art of the blizzard taught dodging, spinning movements that would allow you to strike at opponents' weak points with better positioning. I had wanted to reach the maximum level with the two abilities one at a time, but what art of the lightning promised was too useful to pass up at present. The art of the lightning was all about charging your foes head-on and striking quickly with immense, unstoppable force. After the strike, you would retreat, and then prepare to strike again. I thought that it had a decent amount of synergy with my favored martial art, and it was time to try and use it. This would also be a good chance to test whether I could level the two arts before the end of the dungeon.

After finding a slightly larger corridor, I decided to wait there to train for a little bit. After some time breathing and meditating, I accessed the art of the lightning skill. Instantly, the information that it granted was on the front of my mind, as if I had just read a manual explaining every motion. I could see the strong movements in my mind’s eye, and I just needed to act them out. I activated focus and began to perform the first movements of the beginner art. The additional skill proficiency and experience granted by focus, as well as my now increased understanding and comprehension of lightning made learning the first few forms very easy.

After I had them figured out and had memorized how the attack worked, I sensed the alert in my mind. That meant that my suspicion was correct and that the strange way the skill worked made it function outside of the dungeon system that limited skill growth. I checked my watch and seeing that only 20 minutes had passed, I decided to continue. I set my watch timer to one hour and continued working.

The second level of the skill taught how to use the muscles of the body in such a way as to provide more power with each attack and was particularly difficult to use correctly. It took me the full hour to even get close to mastering the ability, but I could sense that this skill was the foundation of the method and that all other levels after this would rely on how well I mastered this one. I devoted as much time as I could and managed to increase to level 3 only a few minutes before the alarm went off. I decided that two minutes was not enough time to level the skill any longer, so I checked the alerts and disabled the watch alarm.

Skill Alert! Level Up!

Combat Skills: + 100 xp

Beginner Art of the Lightning – lvl 1 -> 3 – you can spend a maximum 20 stamina for instantaneous linear movement in any direction a maximum of (3 ft).

Current Status Increased:

+1 Str

+1 Agi

+1 Dex

Oh? It was good to know that as long as I could see the menu, I could observe the status increases. I suspected that current status increases existed regardless of whether you checked them in the menu or not, but that only by checking the alert would one be able to see the new values appear on the main skill sheet. That would be a difficult hypothesis to test, though.

With a few new moves in my arsenal, I felt a bit more prepared to take on some more spiders. While the 3 feet of instantaneous movement didn’t seem like much, it was more than enough for a quick dodge to avoid an attack, or to rapidly gain some distance from an enemy. The stamina cost was steep considering what the ability offered, but I felt that given the right circumstances it could be worth it.

I had been walking down the corridor for quite some time now and had yet to find another drone room, nor any changes in the path. The cave slanted vaguely downward, and… wait. Something was wrong here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it…

The floor. The cave had been slanted downward for such a long time, and suddenly, it was all completely level. It looked… unnatural. It was far too intentional. I closely examined the surface of the pathway and could see that far ahead of me, the path slanted downwards once again. Now that I knew the limits of the problem area, I could try and search for specific problems. This looked like an excellent trap territory, and I wanted to be careful. It was a long pathway up to this point, and boredom was a perfect way to get someone to believe they were safe then suddenly spring a trap on them. Looking around me, I found some loose stones and began throwing them down the corridor. Four stones in, I didn’t find any problems, but on the fifth stone, instead of the sharp clicking noise of rock on rock, I heard a muffled thump as the stone impacted the ground. Paying very careful attention, I saw the barest movement of a large trap door, about four feet in diameter, slightly opening then immediately popping shut. The only reason I caught it was because of the assistance of the uncanny vision ability. I have been fairly decent at catching traps in the past, but those were all man-made. Natural traps were far more insidious. I used identify on the trap door to see if I could get any information on them.

Trap Door Skullback Spider (rank 2) - Lvl 38 - extremely healthy

Well, fuck. This was a problem. Trap door spiders. And they seemed to be even stronger than the skullback warriors. Not to be confused with trapped door spiders, these big arachnids would create clever holes from which they would pop out and capture their unsuspecting prey. Pulling the bugs out of their homes would be a mess of trouble and would only waste time. The good thing about these spiders was that their doors were hinged, and they tended to only peek out of them one way. That meant that if I could path around the hinges, I could make it through unscathed. The ceiling was particularly low as well, and even if I flew, I was worried that the large arachnids could open their hatches and grab me from below. My only hope was to avoid them altogether.

I threw stone after stone into the corridor, searching for more of the pits, and through my testing I was able to find a total of five trap door spiders. Their doors were almost invisible to the naked eye and had been covered in dirt to act as camouflage. Now that I knew what to look for, I could tell that the trap door spiders would not use rocks to camouflage their doors and that if I found any particularly smooth patches of earth that were clear of stones, I should be wary of surprise arachnids.

Once I was confident that I had found all of the potential dangers, I carefully navigated the treacherous area, paying attention to which side of the trap doors I set foot on. Using my electroreceptivity, I could sense the large spiders while they were still in their homes and get a rough idea of what they looked like. Each one was between four and five feet long and had long front legs, probably to grab their prey with. Needless to say, I was more than happy that we wouldn’t be getting better acquainted. On the other side, I was greeted again with a long passageway in the rough shape of a squashed tube moving deeper into the earth.

Twice more, I encountered a flat space where trap door spiders would wait, but I was able to pass them without much hassle. There were also spaces where large spiral webs blocked the way forward, and the only way through was either to burn the webs and fight a mess of drones or slip through without getting tangled. I had to fight small collections of drones twice, but I managed to get past the areas without combat a couple of times as well. I never needed to use magic either, as the skullback drone encounters had no more than five spiders each time, a manageable number. I guess the big danger was getting entangled in the webs, and then having to deal with the spiders. Luckily, my hands had built-in knives so I could quickly cut myself free.

An hour later, I found myself at the end of the path. I had finally reached a chamber, and surprisingly enough, at the end was the double marble doors that signified the entry to the next floor. Between me and it, though, was a large expanse flat ground around 200 feet long. If the first floor introduced me to spider combat, this floor was the introduction to spider traps. My best guess was that each floor up to a point had a familiar theme, and then later floors would combine those themes for a more difficult challenge. Considering that this was a trap floor, I needed to be especially careful of this room.

That being said, the creator of this floor had made a mistake. The passageway so far was too short to fly though, being between 4 and 5 feet, meaning I had to stoop for most of it. This room, though, was different and had a ceiling around 25 feet high. I just knew that as soon as I entered the room it would be sealed off, but until then I was home free. After a quick check, I could see that the ceiling was covered with webs. Drone spiders were spaced intermittently across the roof of the cave. Most people would need to navigate the trapped door spiders on the ground while keeping an eye on the top of the cave to avoid having a spider land on their heads. I could just fly right through and get to the door.

And that’s exactly what I did. Why bother with a mess of combat when it was entirely unnecessary? I flew around 15 feet in the air and swerved to avoid the drones dropping from the ceiling on their webs. It took only around 20 seconds of extremely patient and careful flying to place my hand on the door. As soon as I did, all of the spiders in the room froze and began to glow with a blue light. I waited in the air, but after a while, I looked back and saw that they had all vanished. Not a single one dropped an item though, leading me to believe that items only dropped that way when you defeated an enemy.

Suddenly, with a loud pop, a small chest appeared at the foot of the slowly opening door. The chest was around a foot tall, and could probably only carry something the size of a large cantaloupe because of the way its lid was shaped. Being wary of traps, I used the end of the sword to tip the lid open, but even when I did nothing happened.

Within the container were two items. One was a health potion again. It was nice to have just in case, but the taste… the taste left a lot to be desired, to say the least. The second thing was far more interesting. It was a leather pouch around the size of my fist. I identified it.

Minor Money Pouch – This pouch can hold up to 500 coins of any type. Always weighs the same.

Considering its name and rarity, it was safe to say that this was a fairly common item to find. It was a good thing for me, though. It might only be an uncommon item, but this would free up plenty of space in my backpack. Plus, it would reduce the weight that I needed to carry around, making it even more convenient. I was strong enough that I could probably carry around 200 pounds of equipment, but my poor backpack was incapable of bearing the load.

The sword alone probably weighed close to 20 pounds, and I could wield it one-handed without issue, so I was plenty strong. The real issue was, I had no idea how strong I was, or what that value meant. I needed to find a weight bench or something, so I could put a number to the strength values that I had. The original system message said that 10 was the maximum human value for each of the stats. But was that true? If I was truly at the maximum human strength when I first changed, I should have been able to match the world record holder for speed and strength right off the bat, but I didn’t think that was the case. I once again had more questions than answers.

I felt a new message ping in my mind, so I went ahead and checked the alert for clearing the floor.

Alert! Floor 2/EEERRROR Cleared! Experience ERROR#4452

Small Clearance Reward Granted!

Enemies Eliminated:

Skullback Drone (Rank 2) x 10: 100 xp

Experience Bonus:

First! (+10%)

Lone Wanderer (+25%)

First Dungeon Dive (+20%)

Total Experience: 155 XP

Alright something weird is going on with the dungeon systems. Give me a second to clear it up.

Skill Alert! Level Up! Current Status Increased!

General Skills:

Acrobatics – lvl 4 -> 5

Quiet Movement – lvl 14 -> 18 – reduces noise generated by movement by (18%)

Uncanny Sight – lvl 1 -> 3

Combat Skills: +20xp

Claw Techniques – lvl 6 -> 8 – bleed chance (24%)

Umm. What? There’s a whole bunch of errors in the menu again, but there’s a sentence at the bottom of the first pop up that is giving me some major warning signs.

Just for grins, I tried asking out loud, “Hello? Is there someone listening?”

I felt another alert ping. I immediately brought it up again.

Yes, sorry about that. I was on break and decided to check up on how the dungeons were running. Nice fight at the end of floor one, by the way. It was close, but you did so well!

I thought I already knew the answer, but I just had to ask.

“Who… is this?”

Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Luna, the current administrator of the system. Well, most of the system, anyway.

Oh damn. This was the de-facto most powerful being on the planet, and she was talking to me right now. What should I do? What should I ask, or say? I had so many questions, and the person with all of the answers just fell into my lap and practically asked for a conversation.

“Do you always watch people? Why most of the system? What is going on with everything right now? My weapon and armor identifies are all off, and the amount of experience I’m being granted is strange as well.”

To answer your first question, I can only easily watch what happens in the dungeons as they are spaces created by the system and aren’t real. Otherwise, I would need to jump through some hoops to spy on people, but I always try and give people privacy. The only reason I decided to watch you in the first place is that you had been flagged as a potential champion by Norr, otherwise I would have chosen someone else. I guess you got lucky?

To answer your next question, I need to start with an explanation. I believe in my previous wave update I said something about the pantheon system being broken, yes? That the members of the pantheon had much more autonomy than they were originally intended to have.

Well, there are a whole suite of members in the pantheon system. The primary ones are the ten I shared in the wave update, but there was a slew of other simple artificial intelligence that would manage many smaller aspects of the system. The problem is that the smaller AI were controlled by the bigger ones, and with the leaders of the pantheon gaining sentience, the lesser ones started getting smarter as well, just slower.

H.G. had most of them managing the experience and damage systems, making sure that they worked correctly, but things are getting a bit out of control, and the lesser AI are abandoning their original jobs in favor of joining their leaders in preparing for conflict. I’m currently patching in a previous version of the system to bring things away from pantheon control, and most of the errors you are seeing are because of that.

That seemed potentially disastrous. Yet more problems caused by the pantheon system.

“So, you had AI controlling damage numbers and experience? How does that work?”

Hmmm, let me give you an example. Think of it like this:

You have two hammers, one made of stone, and one made of iron. You hit someone with both hammers using the same strength and speed. What happens?

The answer is, they deal roughly the same amount of damage, but the stone hammer breaks faster. H.G. didn’t like that idea and instead wanted the stone hammer to deal less damage than the metal one like in video games. Our solution was to have millions of simple AI we called sprites move about and mitigate the damage that certain things dealt. That’s why you can see damage numbers pop up when you hit things. A sprite is in charge of those.

The system I’m patching in will mean that we need virtually no sprites to manage the world, and they can go off into their parts of the system doing what they want. I have no desire to cage sentient beings, regardless if creating them was intentional or not.

That didn’t seem too bad. Would that mean that guns would now work on people and monsters? That could save countless lives.

“Does that mean that we can now use iron and steel as weapons, and they will be just as effective as before?”

Unfortunately, no.

Let me explain the new weapon system to you. This will also be in the next wave notes when it is released in two days, but this should help you out as you are currently stuck in a dungeon.

Instead of damage numbers, weapons will now have three stats. Sharpness, Hardness, and Mana Conductivity.

Sharpness is simple. If you have sharpness matching somethings hardness, you can cut it, but if you have less hardness it has a chance of dulling or breaking the blade. Bludgeoning weapons have no sharpness. Hardness is simple as well; the higher it is, the harder the material. When you strike a hardness 3 material with a hardness 3 weapon, you can break it. If you use a hardness 2 material? You are going to shatter the weapon. That being said, this doesn’t answer your question.

The last stat is mana conductivity, and it is probably the most significant. All creatures have some amount of internal mana making them stronger, or faster, or more sturdy. This gets especially complicated when you are considering different amounts of mana. See, the only thing that can interfere with mana is more mana. If you want to hurt something, you need to infuse your weapon with enough mana to overcome that thing's internal supply of mana. Do you see the problem?

If in order to damage a monster you need something with mana, most old materials just won't work. A gun would work just like normal against a rank 0 person, but against a rank 2 monster? You would be lucky if it even penetrated its skin. The sprites used to manage the damage values for firearms, making sure that they had some amount of usefulness, but now most guns are going to be little more than paperweights. Yet another unintended consequence of H.G.s pantheon. If you want to use a gun now, you need to have mana-conductive bullets.

That made sense. When I was shooting those bandits with the gun, they must have all been rank 1. It did a little bit of damage, but they practically shrugged it off. My fists though would decimate them because I was charged with mana.

“I’m guessing the mana conductivity gives you an idea of how much mana you passively put into the weapon, then?”

That’s right. There are ten levels of it, just like ranks.

They go minor, lesser, intermediate, moderate, advanced, major, extreme, master, ascendant, and ultimate.

Oh yes, about the experience. This is a bit embarrassing… I am, unfortunately, no longer in charge of the experience that monsters grant. The reason you gain experience from killing monsters is that you absorb their internalized aether as your own. This was originally a wildly inefficient system, so we had sprites kept to automate it, granting consistent values for kills. Naturally, we no longer have sprites, so the doling of experience now comes down to Loth and Onor, who grant location experience based on the luck of the person, and battle experience based on the fights. According to them, hunting anything still grants experience, but difficult fights now grant experience more efficiently. I have virtually no say in it anymore.

That made sense as well. The drones only gave a little bit of experience because they were easy to kill. I got a butt load of experience from the warriors because they gave me a hard time.

“Alright, that makes sense as well. I guess the last thing was, what is wrong with the dungeon? The number of floors has an error message after them.”

Yes, that was what originally made me reach out and contact you. I apologize for getting off-topic, but I hope that my explanations helped to perhaps clear some things up.

Now, about the dungeon, would you be willing to do me a little favor?