Three weeks after the dungeon school’s opening they were going to host a tournament for all the four person teams. The grand prize was ten thousand points. Points were used to buy things from ODE’s market, which included things like mana crystals, enhancement crystals, and skill crystals. For instance, if you found a skill crystal in a dungeon that was not useful to you, you could trade it in at the market place and use those points to buy a different skill that was useful. The points were based off of mana crystals, which were the most common thing found in dungeons. Small mana crystals were worth one point, medium ones were worth five points, and large ones were worth twenty points.

Even useless skills cost at least a hundred points, but expensive ones could cost thousands. Once they went above a thousand they were put up for auction, and the current record for the most expensive skill sold was over twenty thousand points.

The grand prize of ten thousand points was a large sum, even when split between four people. Prizes went all the way down to the top five hundred teams, so there was no reason not to participate with a total prize pool of thirty thousand points.

It was only within the last month or so that people had felt they had enough information and were strong enough to challenge dungeons consistently. This meant that most people’s starting point in regard to their skills and stats was fairly even. Most of the students had three or four skills and not many had ones that had reached level twenty. Most also had not used more than a few enhancement crystals.

After hearing from Kyle, Li, and Walt exactly what their skills and stats were, Sarah had spent a minute or so in thought and then started laughing maniacally. She then explained the details of her grinding plan.

There were five dungeons that they had access to. One of them was level zero, and therefor was only really useful for grinding skills more efficiently and not for farming anything. One was level four and too dangerous, which left two level ones and a level two.

While they might be safe running the level two, Sarah had concluded the rewards were not worth the risk. Most of the other students had the same thought, and so for now almost all the teams had decided on running the level one or zero dungeons.

Dungeons were called dungeons because they took after dungeons in RPG’s, not because they were underground or had skeletons hanging from the walls. They appeared as small piles of stone with a magical doorway in them that lead to an instanced area where you fought monsters. That area could be any sort of terrain and be any size. Because each group that entered was teleported to a different copy of the same area, multiple teams of people could use a dungeon at once, although not infinitely. About ten different instances of dungeons could be created on average, but that could be increased.

That is where mana crystals came in. Mana crystals could be used to refill you mana pool, but they were also used in magitech crafting, enchanting, and growing dungeons. By feeding dungeons mana crystals you could increase the number of instances that were able to be formed.

That was one thing that set apart the two level one dungeons, as one was vastly more popular than the other, and therefor needed more mana crystals. This caused the more popular one to have an entrance fee four time higher than the other one.

The more popular one involved fighting nature wolves in a forest with a final boss battle against a giant nature wolf. The wolves gave decent drops and were weak to fire magic, so as long as you had a mage that knew fire spells that boss battle was not that hard. The giant wolf only had five hundred health and took double fire damage so it was quick and painless to take down if you could control his aggro adequately.

The other level one dungeon involved fighting a giant ogre. There was no build up, you immediately spawned in a mountainous region and fought an ogre boss. Bosses gave better drops than regular monsters, so the giant ogre would be more efficient if not for the giant time sink involved.

Unlike the wolf, the ogre had two thousand health and took half damage from all magic. He was big and slow though, so if that was the only thing then he would still be more efficient than the wolves. What made the ogre so inefficient, and even dangerous, was when he dropped to twenty percent health.

When the ogre dropped to twenty percent health he became enraged, upping his magic resistance to eighty percent and giving him fifty percent physical damage resistance in addition to being generally faster, stronger, and more aggressive.

With most boss monsters that had an enraged state, you just nuked them with magic to finish them off. But this was impossible with the ogre thanks to his massive resistances, so most teams that fought him ended up kiting him to whittle him down, which could take over an hour. Running an instance of the wolf dungeon would take around a half an hour so there was no comparison.

That was what had Sarah so excited about. She had determined that it would actually be more efficient for them to run the ogre dungeon, so not only would they get better drops, they would also have to only pay a ten points to create an instance instead of a forty to create one. Granted, this wasn’t huge as once you had formed an instance you could reset it and run it as many times as you wanted, but any advantage they would have over their competition would be helpful.

Once Sarah had finished explaining her plan and everyone had agreed to it, they were all given half an hour to unpack and suit up. The dungeon school provided all the students basic armor to wear to enter the dungeon since most people didn’t have their own. It was basic stuff, but even five armor was better than no armor.

The ogre dungeon was only a ten minute walk from their dorm, and less than forty minutes later the four of them stood in from of the entrance. Part of the reason they all went with Sarah’s plan was the fact that she was the only one among them who had been in a dungeon before. The other three were complete noobs, and despite level one dungeons not being dangerous and Sarah’s plan seeming sound, they couldn’t help but be a bit nervous.

Once Sarah, who had become the defacto leader, paid the entrance fee for the dungeon, the party entered the portal. Kyle was not quite able to describe what it was like going through the portal. It felt both incredibly disconcerting, like being in two places at once, but at the same time as mundane as walking through a doorway.

What awaited them on the other side was the waiting room. Every time you entered a dungeon, you would first enter a twenty, by twenty, by twenty foot room that acted as a sort of waiting area. This limited the amount of people who could enter and instance at once to how many could fit into this room.

It was completely bare and had stone walls that as far as people could tell were unbreakable. In level one and level zero dungeons you could come back to the waiting room at any time, while in higher level dungeons you had to use an escape crystal to make a portal back. In all dungeons you came back here to wait for the instance to reset, but in higher level dungeons you generally left right away since it could take days to complete them, as opposed to level one dungeons which never took longer than a few hours.

Sarah turned to address the other three.

“Okay team, if we stick to the plan there should be no problems. Remember, Li you save fifty mana to use your CC, Walt only take the first attack and then Kyle will heal you with fifty mana. Kyle, spend a hundred more mana on spells to whittle it down. I will pull its aggro and finish it off when it goes enraged and Li CCs it.”

The plan was rather simple, but it had taken Sarah showing the others her stats and skills to convince them that it would work.

Name: Sarah Bailer

Health: 50

Mana: 40

Physical power: 13

Magic power: 2

Skills:

Improved Physical Speed, level 8: Doubles the effective speed of physical power and increases physical power by one per skill level.

Basic Slash, level 23: Deals damage equal to your physical power plus one per skill level. No cooldown or cost. Cannot be combined with other active attack skills.

Basic Health Regeneration, level 10: Passively regenerates health equal to ten plus one per skill level every five minutes. Does not work if you have taken damage in the last sixty seconds.

Basic Mana Regeneration, level 12: Passively regenerates mana equal to ten plus the level of the skill every five minutes.

Mana Blade, level 11: For ten mana you can form a blade made out of mana. This blade lasts for ten minutes. Any attacks made with the blade deal an additional one damage per skill level. It takes five seconds to summon a blade.

Sarah’s special skill, Improved Physical Speed, was well and truly broken. Any skill that improved a stat for every skill level was considered OP and was highly sought after, but that was not the part of the skill that was broken. Each person’s physical power dictated the state of their body. In addition to physical power being used in many skills to determine physical damage, it also determined things like strength, reflexes, running speed, and jumping ability. What doubling Sarah’s effective speed meant, was that instead of her having the speed of someone with thirteen physical power, she had the speed of someone with twenty-six physical power!

Sarah’s other skills combined were no slouches either. When she fought, she used two swords summoned with Mana Blade. Since she was so fast, it was trivial to control and attack with both of them. Anything she lacked in technique she could make up for with speed. If you added up all her skills together and assumed each blade was making one attack each second, it came out to to ninety-four damage per second!

Of course, in reality her DPS was not nearly that high. Unlike firing spells from the backline, while fighting on the frontline you had to block and dodge, and if your weapon did not get a good strike in you would not deal maximum damage. Her damage was still ridiculous though and she could most likely out damage the other three members of the party combined.

Once the party had regrouped, they stepped through another doorway in the stone wall to go to the actual dungeon.

Despite Sarah having been in a dungeon before, she had never been in this dungeon, so when the party members entered the instance they were all treated to a spectacular view. They were up on a ledge slightly above a craggy valley In between towering mountains. The peaks towering above them combined with the twelve foot tall ogre walking in the valley below truly made the scene deserving of the descriptor fantastical.

The four party members quickly got down to business though. They were here to grind, not sightsee.

The battle went according to plan and was actually very anticlimactic. Walt went in first to tank a few hits so he could be healed, and after that Sarah took over the aggro with her DPS. Despite Kyle throwing mana bolt after mana bolt at it, he felt like the gap between their DPS was only widening. Even if the ogre took regular magic damage Sarah still would have been out damaging him.

Walt was stuck chasing the ogre as it chased Sarah and hacking at its ankles and Li, because of her small mana pool, basically stood around and waited to use her skill.

Sarah gave plenty of notice when the giant ogre entered its enraged state, so Li had plenty of time to cast her skill, Shadow Suppression.

Shadow Suppression, level 4: Shadows prevent an enemy from taking any actions for a number of seconds equal to twice the user’s magic power plus one per skill level. Cannot be used on the same target within 120 seconds. Costs 50 mana. Five second cast time. Can target anything within sixty feet of the user.

Li had four magic power, so the ogre was suppressed for a total of twelve seconds. Sarah didn’t even need half that time to kill it though since she could focus purely on offense.

The four of them came and stood around the ogre’s corpse.

“That’s it?” Walt said. “How is this thing even a boss? That took like, what, five minutes?”

“I make the best plans,” said Sarah with a smile on her face that could only be called smug. “Just stick with me and I can power level you noobs.”

Kyle didn’t want to admit it, but Sarah had certainly carried them. Whether it be the plan, the tanking, or the DPS, Sarah had done it all.

Li started jumping around impatiently.

“So what did it drop? A skill crystal? An enhancement crystal?”

“Let’s find out,” Sarah said.

Sarah placed her hand on the corpse and concentrated for a second. The corpse then shimmered briefly, before disappearing and leaving a large mana crystal in its place.

The disappointment they felt was palpable.

“Eh, it could have been a medium crystal,” Sarah said.

As expected of a veteran of dungeon expeditions, she was used to the monster drops while the other three only had skills and enhancements in their eyes.

“C’mon, back to the waiting room we go!” Sarah commanded. “If it only takes that long to run we can do it a bunch more times before dinner. The faster we regen our mana the faster we can run this again!”

They ended up running the dungeon eleven more times before deciding to head to dinner before coming back, with each run taking about fifteen minutes total with fighting time and resting time. The drops they got were two skill crystals, one of which Sarah insisted was a regeneration skill, two enhancement crystals, and a little under a hundred points in mana crystals if you factor in the ten points of crystals they had to pay to enter the dungeon.

When the party got out of the dungeon they all excitedly went to get the skill crystals identified. Just by holding them you could get a feeling for what their skill did, like if it was magical or physical, but for specifics you needed to get them identified with a skill or artifact. Sarah, as the one with the most experience, had bet on a mana regeneration skill and some sort of defense skill. Since no one else had held very many skill crystals they were not knowledgeable enough to disagree with her.

When they arrived to get their crystals identified there was only one group ahead of them so the wait wasn’t too long. They all excitedly stepped up to the window while Sarah handed the skill crystals over to the woman behind the counter. If you were experienced you could often tell what kind a skill it was by holding the crystal, but it was impossible to determine the power level with anything other than a proper identification or absorbing the skill.

The woman behind the counter took both the crystals to examine.

“Okay, let’s see what you have here.”

The crystal in her hand was briefly enveloped in a blue glow.

“This is a Basic Mana Regeneration skill. I trust you all know what it does?”

The four before her nodded, a bit gloomy. They all had mana regeneration skills so the crystal was useless to them.

The woman smiled.

“Judging by your expressions this crystal is useless for you. You can trade it in for a hundred points if you don’t need it.”

“Yeah, just do that,” Sarah said. “Also while you’re at it, we would like you to convert these mana crystals to points.”

Sarah put the mana crystals on the counter. It had been decided beforehand that Sarah would be the one to hold the groups shared earnings.

“Certainly,” the woman replied with a smile. “Wait just a minute while I put this is.”

After she finished some typing on her computer she turned to the other skill crystal.

“Oh! This one is more uncommon,” she said. “It is called Basic Blocking Damage Reflection. And, let’s see… It looks like you can trade it in for three hundred points. Let me print out a skill description for you.”

The woman relatively quickly printed out a piece of paper and handed it to Sarah. Everyone crowded around her to read the skill description.

Skill name: Basic Blocking Damage Reflection

Effect: When using an active blocking skill, you return damage equal this skills level as reflected damage. The reflected damage ignores all armor and resistances. This effect cannot be stacked with another passive blocking damage reflection skill.

After reading the skill, everyone turned to Walt. Even though he didn’t have a blocking skill yet, they were not uncommon and since he was the tank, he would most likely be the one to get a blocking skill first, if the others got one at all.

“What do you think Walt? Sarah said. “The skill is basic and you don’t have a blocking skill yet, but skills like these are great for tanks.”

Walt went into the tank. He wanted the skill, but currently it would be useless to him, and if they had another three hundred points they could buy a different skill.

After thinking for a bit, Walt said, “Why don’t we hold on to it for the moment. There is no reason for me to learn it yet anyway. That way, if we need to trade it in for some reason we still can.”

The woman had been listening to their conversation so she quickly finished their transactions. The team was then left with a skill crystal that was currently useless, 197 points, and two enhancement crystals.

“Let’s go eat dinner and while we eat we can talk about what to do with the enhancement crystals,” Kyle said.

Everyone agreed, and after asking directions from the woman behind the counter, they headed off to eat dinner.