A favor? I wasn’t against the idea of helping a stranger, but this was still some extremely crazy shit going on, and I was just barely wrapping my head around the fact that I was having a conversation with Luna. She seemed so incredibly casual for someone with the ability to change the fundamental laws governing reality. I was oddly… comfortable.

“I don’t mind giving you a hand, but can I hear what the favor is first before I decide for sure?”

Naturally. I wouldn’t want you to accept anything without completely understanding what you were getting into. What I would like you to do is very simple anyway, and I believe you would have accomplished it without my asking in the first place.

The first five levels of any dungeon are supposed to be introductory floors to get you used to the enemies, traps, and combat. The deeper floors are the actual challenge. It seems like whatever problem has arisen has not interfered with the top floors, so I can observe them, but for some reason I cannot observe any of the floors below that threshold. Because dungeons are in an isolated space outside of the real world, I cannot forcibly access them without destroying everything inside permanently.

This would be catastrophic and would cause magical tides and surges in the area around the dungeon. If it were to happen, we could even see monsters as powerful as rank 5 appear, and I will not unleash that calamity in this area. Lucky for us, there is a loophole; while I cannot observe the dungeon, I can observe you. Because you are a champion candidate, you have a link to the pantheon system that makes you act like a beacon to system administrators, so I can follow you around without any issues. I simply ask that you descend into this dungeon as far as you can so that I can scout what has been happening. I fear that this is not the only dungeon that has gone awry, and any intelligence on the situation I could get would be helpful.

In exchange, I will grant you the rarest drop from the deepest floor you descend to. I can still mess with the odds a bit and give you a surge of luck that would assure you an amazing item. What do you say?

That seemed rather reasonable, I suppose, and the reward sounded amazing. I was planning on delving into the dungeon down to the fifth floor and then leaving, but if I was still willing to dive deeper when I reached the fifth floor, I had no qualms with continuing downward. The skill experience was excellent, but more than anything else, the combat is what made the whole trip worthwhile. I could use my martial arts just fine, but I was still a greenhorn when I came to battles. Each encounter I started ended just a little bit faster, and I used my attacks and skills just a little bit more efficiently. If I left here, what would I do anyway? I would just go find another dungeon or ruin to loot to do the same thing as before.

“I like the terms, but if it’s okay with you, I’d like to make my final decision on the fifth floor. I don’t know how well I’ll do on the floors below the fifth one, and I’d like to use my time here as a metric. Is that fine?”

Absolutely. I do not want to see you harmed, and if at any point you feel you cannot dive any deeper, feel free to quit.

“Alright then. I guess there’s nothing to it than to continue on the path. I guess I’ll talk to you again on the fifth floor?”

Yes, that’s fine. I have an alarm set to alert me when you arrive. In the meantime, I have some work to get back to. Please be careful! I wish you the best of luck.

And then the box was gone, and I was alone in the spider caves once more. The first floor was basic combat. The second floor had traps. What did the third floor have in store for me? I had a sneaking suspicion that the answer was more fucking spiders.

The stairwell was identical to the one that went from the first to the second floor, and as I descended, I kept a hand on the left wall for stability. The stairs were extremely steep, and I spiraled downward through enough rotations to start to become dizzy. I wonder if the discombobulation was intentional.

Eventually though, I reached an end to the stairs, and saw why it took such a long time climbing down. In front of me was a forest, though instead of trees grew great fungal spires, brown mushrooms the size of buildings, their caps meshing together to create a solid layer. I was stood atop a hill, with an obvious trail leading down into the forest, glowing blue fungal caps lining either side. The cavern in front of me extended into the black, a much greater distance than my eyes could see through the darkness. Aside from the light on the trail, the roof of the cavern was occasionally lit with sparse glowing spots that I couldn’t yet identify. They shone with an orange-yellow light, very different than the mushrooms I had seen on the previous floors.

The cavern itself was high enough to let me easily spread my wings, and I was sure I could simply fly to the end of the floor and move on. The problem was the potential loss of money, new crafting items, and skill levels. I wanted to take Luna’s offer seriously, and that meant that I needed to work if I was to be secure on the deeper levels. I almost died on the first freaking floor, and I didn’t like my odds any deeper. At least not right now. What’s more, it would be difficult to experiment with the longsword on the deeper floors, and the extra penetration my spider blade would provide was very attractive. I decided that I would take the forest path, kill a few bugs, and grind some skill levels while I could. Already I could hear the screech of the spider monsters through the cavern, muffled by the mega flora, so I knew combat was on the horizon.

First on the docket was to max out claw techniques. I had two levels to go, and I wanted to master it so I could move on to something more interesting. When I maxed out unarmed combat, I didn’t get the chance to choose any skill derivations. That being said, I suspected that part of the reason for that was because combat skills are tied to the class system, and it hadn’t been added in yet when I reached the max level in unarmed combat.

The next thing I wanted to do was finish off quiet movement and upgrade it to an advanced form. That would give me much greater survivability. It was also possible that I could get an assassin-like skill for sneak attack damage. I didn’t want to become a stealth fighter, but taking out one enemy right at the start of combat then mopping up the rest was an excellent tactic. This floor was large, dark, and probably full of monsters. I couldn’t think of a better place to try and work on it.

The main issue with grinding here was that I would not be able to access the skill up menu until I beat the floor. Considering that only one party could occupy a floor at a time, it was probably a function added to keep people from clogging dungeons by grinding easy monsters for long periods. You didn’t get skill ups until the end, so there was only so much work you could put in before you needed to move on, and there was no way to know how much work that was. The function meant that I would have no idea when I could stop focusing on claw techniques and trying to guess when my proficiency had leveled up seemed almost impossible. However, I had an idea that might function as a workaround.

While I couldn’t access the skill menu until the floor was beaten, I did manage to access it at the start of the second level by increasing my beginner art of the lightning. My theory was that if I increased all of my other skill levels and then increased my art skill level once, the system would see me accessing a skill up menu generated from the art and level up everything right then and there before the end of the floor. My arts seemed like such a special case I thought there was a good chance of the loophole existing. The only way to be sure was to test it, though.

First things first, I needed to find some enemies to hunt. There were going to be ambushes on the path, so if I wanted to find enemies that would be a good place to start. I activated quiet movement and crept into the mushroom grove. I opted to stay around 20 feet to the right of the path, a line of mega shrooms between me and the glowing fungi denoting the edge of the walkway. I was no more than a few minutes into my hike when I saw the first arachnids. They were hanging on the underside of the mushroom caps about 40 feet ahead of me and appeared to be watching the walkway for any sign of movement. A slight bend in the road meant that an unwary traveler might get sprung on from behind.

I was able to count five spiders waiting in ambush, and they came in two varieties. One was familiar. Three of the bugs were the lesser warriors I fought at the end of the first level, their dark grey carapaces glinting in the blue glow, and their scything front limbs at the ready. The other kind was something new. They were a light green, though they still had the familiar skull-shaped marking on their backs in a pale white. They had short legs and possessed no visible weapons like their warrior counterparts. I identified them.

Lesser Skullback Warrior – lvl 6 – healthy

Lesser Skullback Warrior – lvl 5 – healthy

Lesser Skullback Warrior – lvl 8 – healthy

Skullback Spitter – lvl 7 - healthy

Skullback Spitter – lvl 8 - healthy

From the name, it was fairly clear that they were a type of ranged combatant. I needed to take them out first. Lucky for me the pair of Spitters were isolated. They hid behind their more heavily armored siblings, preparing their ambush from what they considered a safe place. Unfortunately for them, it also made it easy for me to wipe them out from behind.

I crept around them, doing my best to give the group of spiders a wide berth, making sure that they weren’t alerted. The spiders were hanging upside down from the cap of a mushroom, and their backs were turned to me. They were only a few feet apart, and I thought that if I was quick, I could kill them both with my claws at the same time.

Moving into position, I used the wind to throw myself into the air like I was shot out of a cannon. I rose to meet the bugs and rammed into them. Each of my hands went through their thorax, critically injuring them, and making them fall to the ground. Hearing the sound of my attack, the warriors fell to the ground as well. This time though, they didn’t have their large friends to protect them. I fell on them in a storm of flashing claws and fury and made short work of the lesser warriors before they could effectively counterattack. They had been surprised and had to fall to the ground in order to fight me, and that gave me the ability to kill them quickly. Their carapaces were strong but nowhere near as strong as the larger warrior spiders. It took a few hits each, but they all eventually fell.

I was a bit disheartened though, as even having successfully performed a surprise attack against them, the warriors still damaged me around 70 health during the brief encounter. I had not used any mana while fighting, so I simply healed myself to the max once again. As I cast the healing spell I focused, trying to understand just how the magic worked so that I could replicate it without using the pre-built spell, but I was unable to sense anything. I had suspicions that it worked as it did because a significant portion of my body was made of water, but there was no way to be sure until I had a greater proficiency with my magic. I also needed to test it on others to determine if it had a similar effect. Regardless of my lack of understanding of my abilities, the combat was successful. I needed to hunt more spiders while I still could.

I set off through the grove to explore. As I did, I carefully walked along the path and into the clearings of the forest, taking note of what I saw. The flora of the level was limited to the large mushrooms, but after some observation I could see that they came in many sizes, from only a few feet tall, to over 40. As I walked, I was constantly vigilant for groups of enemies and monsters, and I was not disappointed with the lack of excitement.

The spider groups seemed to pop up out of nowhere and would be hiding at random throughout the level. While they were more concentrated along the trail, due to the size of the floor, I had no trouble finding monsters to fight. Through my scouting I determined that this side of the forest was populated with a combination of Lesser Warriors, Spitters, and swarms of Drones. Each group of spiders contained around 5 members, and my surprise attack tactic worked well against them, the Drones being the notable exception. When I fought the weaker spiders, they were usually in groups of ten or twenty, and I was forced to use spells to destroy them en masse or risk becoming overwhelmed.

I had been exploring for almost two hours, the soft earth quietly compressing beneath my shoes as I walked through the near darkness. Feeling a strange breeze, I immediately froze and examined my surroundings, and quickly determined the culprit. After a small layer of mushroom trees, there was a long clearing where the ground was blacker than anything I had ever seen before. I could see the trail from where I was, and it too ended abruptly into the black. I knew what this was.

This was a chasm. It was deeper than anything I could fathom, and even standing ten feet from the edge filled me with trepidation and an unpleasant feeling.

The chasm blocked the trail, and at its end I could see a large open ring lit with glowing mushroom caps. Within the ring sat a familiar arachnid; one of the large black warriors I encountered at the end of the first floor. It blocked the way to a rickety wooden bridge spanning the black. The canyon stretched horizontally across the whole cavern, blocking all attempts to cross by other means unless you could fly. Flying seemed a viable option to avoid the fight, but something was screaming at me that it was a foolhardy idea.

It was a new feeling altogether and was extremely hard to pin down. I was a monster, and that came with some additional instincts that I was slowly gaining familiarity with, but I had never felt my instincts this way before. What I was feeling now was something new. It was like the sinking feeling you had when you just knew that something terrible was about to happen but magnified and directed towards the chasm. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only way across the chasm was by crossing the bridge. All other paths would lead to a quick and painful death.

I quickly fled from the edge, finding myself once again on the trail. I had already cleared the spiders from here, but I did not trust that they would not respawn, or that new ones would take their place. I took to the skies and returned to the start of the floor where I knew I would be safe from the arachnid army.

The chasm combined with the thought of facing yet another large warrior had spooked me, and I resolved myself to train. It was time to test if my loophole worked as I wanted it to.