About five minutes was enough for Allen’s MP to regenerate completely, mostly due to how small his overall mana pool was rather than the speed of his regeneration. His endurance was high enough that he could keep going without any more rest.

After Amelia healed some scrapes and bruises, everyone was ready to fight some more. While getting hurt was generally bad, the healer needed experience too, so Allen just figured he was doing her a favor by getting his liver cut open earlier.

Camila was also more than ready to continue. Rather than putting her enormous morning star back into her inventory, which would have taken a lot of mana, she rolled it into the middle of the open area where they had fought the last three ghouls. It was still extremely hard for her to lift, but Rage would help with that over time.

It wasn’t long before Christopher announced that more monsters were coming. “Six this time, two from the right.” he began pointing off into the shadows of the dungeon. “Roughly the same levels as before.”

Allen pursed his lips. The three ghouls from earlier had been level twenty-two, twenty-five, and twenty-four. At level fifteen he probably wouldn’t even get more than a hundred experience for each.

That was completely justified, of course, given the fact that he had killed most of them in essentially one strike with a mundane knife. Fighting some rare creature or other people was different though. Defeating a sapient enemy was far more difficult than killing a mindless monster, and the System knew it.

“Dead Calm is spinning up and Strike is half charged,” Allen thought. The former would hopefully help him avoid the monster’s attacks just a little earlier. Strike, on the other hand, wasn’t really worth charging for any longer than a minute for the ghouls. The full power just wasn’t necessary to kill them.

When the six Shade Ghouls scrambled out of the darkness of the cave and into the light, the battle began again. Just like last time, Camila whistled with the effect of her skill, drawing the monsters near. They screeched wildly and rushed at her, but Ty stepped in and blocked them while the Berserker jumped around and slashed at any spiked and clawed limbs she could.

Every so often, Christopher would send a ball of mana into the ghoul’s faces to distract them. They didn’t do any damage, but the spells made their movements even more erratic and unfocused. The berserker was then easily able to move through them and take out some of their twisted arms and bone spikes.

Allen stayed in his hiding spot until an opening presented itself. He jumped down from a rock ledge, knife poised in a downward blow. He landed on the nearest ghoul and plunged his weapon into its neck. His high dexterity allowed him to guide his attack straight into the ghoul’s weak spot while avoiding its many spikes, killing it in one shot with Assassinate.

He then quickly moved on to the next ghoul and worked his way in from the back of the pack. Two more of the monsters fell to Assassinate. The fourth was smashed apart by Camila after it got passed Ty’s shield.

Allen approached the fifth. Killer Instinct helped him slide under a gangly arm that the ghoul swung at Ty. Coming up on the other side of it, he stabbed into its neck with Assassinate. The attack wasn’t strong enough to cut completely through its bone, but Camila quickly beheaded it a moment later.

The last remaining ghoul had caught sight of Allen though. It locked on to him and lunged forward. Killer Instinct told him to dodge backwards, so he did, narrowly evading a clawed swipe. The ghouls were faster than him, but not smarter and definitely not nearly as subtle.

Ty came up beside him and bashed the monster with his shield, giving Allen an opening. He wreathed his knife in his miasma and jammed his knife into the ghoul’s eye socket just as it reared its head at him. With Strike charged to almost three quarters, the attack blew the ghoul’s brain apart from inside its head. Gore shot out from every hole in in its mangled head as the monster screeched again in anger.

Allen immediately rolled backwards, leaving his knife to avoid the ghoul’s last mad swing of its third arm. It convulsed and shook in its final moments before Camila ended it with a swing of her claymore. The heavy blow smacked the ghoul’s head into the ground, cracking it open like a ripened melon.

Ty and Allen let out a breath after looking around and confirming that all six Shade Ghouls were re-deaded. Camila was taken by her Rage skill by then. She was just standing still with her jaw clenched, staring out into the cave as her chest heaved with each breath.

Looking back at Christopher, Allen noted that he was still engaged with other monsters in the room. “After those six, there should be around twenty more of them and then an area boss.”

They rested again before Christopher guided another pack of ghouls towards them, no more than last time. The group then repeated the same strategy three more times until only the area boss remained at the other side of the cavern, guarding the exit.

All three of the fighters had managed to get hit by the monsters at some point, but Amelia had gotten to them faster than she had with Allen the first time. She still had to cut out the cursed flesh, but it the spread wasn’t as bad, making it much faster to treat and orders of magnitude less painful.

After a few moments to catch their breath, the group calmly moved on to the other end of the cavern. Christopher had to ride on Ty’s back for most of the way due to the lack of wheelchair accessibility in the dungeon. It would have taken hours to push him around all the rock formations. Although, going by the professor’s estimate, it would still take at least fifteen minutes to reach the other side at a leisurely pace, which would be more than enough time to fully recover everyone’s resources.

Allen started charging Strike after the group had been walking for five minutes. The skill slowly drained his MP until it had charged to a maximum of one-hundred. However, once it reached that point it would still continue to drain his MP, wasting it completely. Timing was obviously important with Strike, considering it took ten whole minutes to fully charge.

Dead Calm on the other hand would take two hundred minutes to fully charge, which was over three hours. It was a different kind of skill though and it was only tier three, so it had room for improvement.

Since nobody had gotten any messages and Dead Calm was still slowly charging, Allen knew the area boss was somehow still engaging them. The question was how. Christopher wasn’t distracting it with his magic because the monster wasn’t moving from its spot. He thought about it for the next few minutes that it took for the group of five to approach the monster.

“There are only a few things that could be keeping us engaged outside of a fight,” he told himself. “Status effects like poison, scrying, running away from something, and… illusions.” Out of the four options, the last one seemed the most likely. Nobody had any status effects anymore, they weren’t running, and scrying was a very advanced skill. “I think we’re under the effect of an illusion,” Allen said suddenly.

“What?” Ty started, “How?”

“When it comes to illusions, the question is not ‘how,’ but ‘when,’” Allen replied, looking around the cave for any signs as they walked.

“I would certainly be able to sense any magical constructs invoked by something below level one-hundred,” Christopher reasoned from Ty’s back.

“Not necessarily,” Allen said, “Stay aware.”

Christopher seemed to have something to say, but he stayed quiet even when the group came into a large open space after emerging from under a tight passage between two rock formations. The shadows were deep and very dark in the corners of the dungeon and between the rocks. However, the first thing Allen noticed was the heavy wrought iron door in the far wall of the cavern. It was twice as tall as Allen and covered in splotches of rust. Instead of a doorknob, it had a lever that connected to three sturdy bolt latches on its frame.

“This is a natural dungeon, right?” Christopher asked rhetorically. “I feel the presence something coming from the door but now I don’t entirely trust my senses.”

“Could be a stupid ass mimic,” Ty suggested.

Camila grunted affirmatively in response. It was rather impressive that she could respond at all with Rage in effect.

“That doesn’t really fit the theme though,” Allen added.

“What theme?” Ty asked.

“Fucked up cave crawlers like in that movie The Descent.”

“Huh?”

“…Forget it.”

The group stood in silence for a few seconds, thinking about what to do. The worst possible option would be to just walk straight into the obvious trap just ahead, but nobody really had a better way to easily and assuredly uncover something.

Allen watched the shadows for any movement, but he couldn’t see anything outside of the light that Christopher’s magic cast to the edges of the cavern. Knotting his brow, he shifted his attention to the shadows themselves. It was very subtle, but he realized they had gotten seemingly thicker since the beginning of the room. The darkness appeared to just barely cling to any surface it touched like a cloud of gas instead of a simple lack of brightness. The angle of the lighting was also slightly off in some places, casting shadows where there shouldn’t be any. It was that last clue that convinced Allen that he was looking at a suggestive hallucination rather than an externally evoked illusion.

The heavy shadows were in their heads, and so was the monster.