Michael's night was peaceful, his morning was less so. Despite not feeling all that tired the night before he ended up sleeping through breakfast. Unfortunately, Hazel did not. Smelling the tantalizing aroma of cooked meat, the bear made its way down the stairs to the common area. The sight of a hungry bear walking down the stairs would almost always send people running, even after the Manapocalypse. After Bastion was founded and a safe zone was established many of the people chose to focus on their Professions and stay far away from fighting. Life hadn’t prepared them for daily fights to the death and even though all of them had killed, most preferred the peace behind the walls.

Unfortunately for Hazel and the still sleeping Michael, that was not the case for the inhabitants of this particular inn. With the nearby dungeon scaring away many of the monsters those seeking to hunt them had to travel a fair amount and stay in the wilderness for days at a time in order to bring back a decent haul of loot. The more extreme of these would spend over 80% of their time outside the walls. Since they spent so much of their time in the wilderness a house in the town made little sense, so they often ended up staying at an inn during the brief time they spent in civilization. In fact, they usually stayed at one specific inn more than most.

The yells woke Michael up, but it was the wall shaking thumps that got him jumping out of bed. Taking a quick look around the room turned up a distinct lack of bear which, coupled with his growling stomach, filled in a few blanks. After taking a moment to put on his gear Michael burst out of the door, narrowly missing a woman who was sprinting away from the stairs. Looking after the woman, who dove out of the building through a window, Michael raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s not good.”

Rushing downstairs Michael got half-way down but stopped at the sight in front of him. Hazel was in the middle of the common room, the remains of a pair of tables and several chairs strewn about her, while six people were currently trying to kill her. That wasn’t sight that stopped him however, it was the thirteen unconscious people scattered about the room. Hazel had apparently been busy.

Michael took in everything that was going on, from the screaming, sword-wielding man trying to turn one Hazel into two half-Hazels to the blue-haired mage readying a spell. Pulling out his bow, an arrow already nocked, Michael felt the world slow down as he pulled the bow to full draw. Reverse infusing a Wind-attuned Wizard Arrow he took careful aim and released. The arrow whistled through the air, pinging off the warrior's sword, ricocheting off a beam, clipping the mages ear, deflecting off the tanks shield, slicing through the archer's bowstring, passing right in front of the healer's eyes and finally smacking into the second mages leg, expending the last of its energy. Everyone apart from the healer and Hazel went flying, the poor mage doing a flip from the shot to the leg.

The shot seemed like a miracle, a one in a million shot that was even less than once in a lifetime, except it wasn’t. The unlocked version of Maglavin Archery made all of it possible, even the reverse infused spell. When Michael held a bow in his hands it felt as if his entire being ... shifted. Like one of those 3D images where you can’t see anything until your perspective changes and suddenly, you’re looking at a panda. Timing, trajectory, wind speed; all of it became instinctual, as if another sense had opened up. It even worked with other skills like his Spell Arsenal. By altering how he infused a spell he could change its effect on the arrow, like changing the wind attuned Wizard Arrow and increasing its knockback power while reducing its penetration. The sensation was like infusing the spell backwards, so he called it a reverse infusion. It wasn’t all that useful in terms of damage but amazingly useful for crowd control.

Silence descended in the inn as the assorted attackers took stock of the new threat. Michael sighed; this wasn’t going to be easy to explain.

As Michael expected, it was difficult to explain. The entire conversation involved a lot of shouting, a few repeats for those regaining consciousness and several threats involving putting parts of his anatomy inside other parts of his anatomy. Michael was actually impressed, some of the insults had been quite inventive. Eventually Michael and Hazel were allowed to leave physically unmolested after paying hefty fine for the damages. They were also banned from the establishment, something that was neither a surprise nor a problem. The town was nice, but it wasn’t all that interesting apart from the Dungeon. Speaking of the dungeon, the intrepid duo decided to head that way after grabbing breakfast at a nearby street vendor. The poor man nearly fainted from fright when they showed up and then nearly fainted from happiness once Michael ordered a small mountain of food for Hazel.

With full bellies and the memory of the inn rapidly fading the pair headed towards the town gate, a large imposing pair of black iron gates. Black iron made up a large portion of the towns building materials, the metal being both extraordinarily dense as well as mana resistant. For most towns this material would be reserved to the most important structures due to its relative scarcity. The metal only existed in areas with large amounts of Death Mana which, despite its cheery sounding name, had a habit of putting people off. Once again, the unique circumstances of Bastions creation led to a unique opulence. Not that Michael knew anything about that, he simply thought the gates looked ugly and dull.

The Jaden Lanmò dungeon stood in the middle of a large graveyard, something Michael simply couldn’t understand.

“How is there a graveyard? Was it here originally and Gaia missed it or did the dungeon somehow create it, like the Vitr Heimr dungeon creating the ice field?” Michael asked, staring at the assorted gravestones.

[No idea]

“Hey! What did I say? From now on you speak out loud until you can speak without sounding horrifying. This morning might have gone a lot different if you didn’t sound like the garbled voice of a demon child's ghost.” The real reason for this morning's incident had come out during the half-yelled discussion. When Hazel had come down the first to see her had been waitress. Despite only being shocked at first, when Hazel tried to say hello the poor girl screamed and ran from the “Monster”. The patrons in the inn saw a girl running away from a bear screaming Monster and reacted as expected.

“fwine. Eye ave nowl I-ear. (Fine. I have no idea)" Hazel said, struggling to form the words.

“Wait, what?” Michal asked, thoroughly confused.

Hazel huffed, annoyed. Rather than re-butchering the English language she simply pointed a paw at the gravestones.

Michael looked at where Hazel was pointing, realization dawning. “You’re right, we should go ahead with the dungeon. You really need to work on your pronunciation, that sounded completely wrong.”

Hazel stared at Michaels back, tears in her eyes from the misunderstanding. After a few seconds she followed the man, her shoulders slumped in defeat.

During yesterday's conversation Thomas had gone through the basics for the dungeon. The Jaden Lanmò Dungeon portal plopped them out in the middle of a massive graveyard that stretched on for miles. Within the graveyard there were roving bands of monsters of various types. The majority were simple Zombies, half rotten bodies shambling around in packs of 30 or larger. Slow and dumb the zombies could be easily taken down from afar but became problematic up close due to their high Strength and large numbers.

The next most common were the Skeleton Knights. They roamed about in pairs and came equipped in broken armor and wielding rusted swords that, despite their decrepit appearance, could still deal some serious damage. The skeletons were faster than the Zombies but what really made them dangerous was the occasional Skeleton Mage that appeared with them. Possessing a range Necrotic Magic, the mages could debuff people as well as heal their knightly counterparts. Their spells did very little damage but could severely hamper a person's fighting abilities; blinding, slowing and shackling were among the curses they wielded.

The biggest threat, apart from the Dungeon Boss, came from the Vampires. Armed with blinding speed and blood magic, they hit hard and fast and left their victims with irremovable blood curses. To add insult to injury the vampires had a passive life steal effect, allowing them to heal themselves every time they drew blood. To add a cherry on top of the insult cake, the creatures retained some semblance of intelligence, preying almost solely on the weak or isolated and employing ambush and guerrilla tactics. In a fair fight the creatures were a difficult challenge, but these monsters laughed at the thought of a fair fight. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since a side effect of vampirism is the decay of the limbic system, making the creatures emotionless and therefore unable to find the concept of a fair fight funny.

When Michael and Hazel popped through the portal they were immediately beset by a horde of zombies. The paths of the various monsters are completely random, meaning there existed the possibility that they could be right next to the portal as someone entered. It was simply bad luck.

For the Zombies, that is. As soon as Michaels Gletser Aura hit the monsters their speed went from turtle to snail. The cold damage from the aura was ignored, undead possessing an innate immunity to cold damage, but none of the monsters could ignore the fuzzy ball of destruction that was Hazel. After using Buffeting Roar to push back the nearest zombies she went to work. The zombies were resistant to most magic, but physical attacks worked fine and Hazel was having a ball batting zombies left and right.

Michael took a moment to analyze the situation. Hazel was throwing the Zombies around pretty easily but wasn’t actually doing much damage. Without targeting their heads her powerful attacks had reduced effect. Communicating with Hazel he tried to get her to target the heads but precision wasn’t Hazels strong suit. Since that was the case, Hazel could continue to attract the monsters attention while Michael would take them out with precise shots.

They started to quickly take out the zombies one by one, Hazel occasionally killing one by herself through a healing spell. Getting through the zombie horde still took a while, most of the zombies taking several arrows to the head to take down. The zombies were a bad match for the two for several reasons. Along with cold immunity the zombies also had poison immunity, meaning that Michaels only AoE attack spell was out. He did fire off his other spells whenever he could but if the zombies decided to swarm him, he would need to run like a tiny little coward with his tail between his legs.

Fortunately for him, Hazel served as an excellent tank. Even though her spells did very little damage she still pelted the Zombies as much as possible to keep them distracted. That, along with using her body as the scarier version of a wrecking ball, meant that Michael could pretty much stay still the entire time and fire arrows like a sprinkler.

Michael was relieved when the last Zombie dropped, the monsters were really disgusting. They looked exactly like a normal human corpse that was left in a swamp for three weeks before being kicked by squirrel. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly why it looked like it was kicked by a squirrel, he just knew that it was. The stench was solved thanks to a special ‘fragrance’ potion he’d bought in Town, but every time he aimed his bow he’d end up focusing intensely on the Zombies. Staring at rotten flesh might have made some people happy, but Michael wasn’t one of them.

As Michael looked over the graveyard, his perception picking out the hundreds of shambling forms, and sighed; this was not going to be an enjoyable experience. To take his mind off the gory horror, Michael pulled up the Dungeon Info.

Jaden Lanmò Dungeon Info

Tier 3 Death Aspect Dungeon.

Enemies:

- Zombie

- Skeleton Knight

- Skeleton Mage

- Vampire

Dungeon clear conditions :

- Defeat all Dungeon Monsters

- Defeat Marturu Orek

5 Seals

Clear percentage : 5.3%

Looking through the info Michael found most of it to be expected, apart from the seals. It was possible that Thomas simply hadn’t told him about it but it was unlikely, the guy had been surprisingly thorough. Michael had brought up the possibility of hidden rooms or anything similar, but apparently killing the Boss got people to 100% completion. Michael was thoroughly confused as to what the purpose of the seals were but he knew one way of finding out; finding the seals.

The two of them tore through two more Zombie hordes before they came across their first pair of Skeleton Knights. Sadly, Michael made a bit of a mistake when he found the knights. Michael tried to test the pair with a Boulder Throw but the spell completely destroyed both of them, the hurtling slab of rock scattering their bones and undoing the magic that sustained them. The attack also destroyed any remaining durability on their gear, leaving behind little more than dust.

Pointedly ignoring Hazel's stare, Michael scanned for the next monsters. Fortunately, there was another pair of Skeleton Knights nearby. Even better, there was a Skeleton Mage with the knights, making them an even juicier target. The dungeon was something of a peculiarity in that it technically had an endless number of monsters; every time a monster was killed a new one would spawn in an endless cycle. If they wanted to, they could simply kill hundreds of zombies until they reached the required 95% completion to summon the Boss. Once the boss was summoned the rest of the monsters would disappear.

That being said, Michael had no intention of exclusively fighting the putrid flesh bags known as Zombies just to summon the Boss. For one thing, they were putrid. For another, to get to 95% would require them to kill 950 of them which is 951 more than Michael wanted to. Skeletons on the other hand, gave 1% per kill. They also smelled a lot better which shouldn’t really be a factor when choosing targets, but it very much was.

Without waiting for his Boulder Throw to go off cooldown Michael went ahead and started the next fight. Since he wasn’t an idiot, despite what some people might think, he started the fight by utterly destroying one of the knights with a Power Shot. The arrow, infused with an Earth attuned Wizard Arrow to give it extra weight, entered through one of the useless earholes of the skeletons helmet, disintegrated its skull and exited through the other earhole, leaving the helmet to flop to the ground, as useless in life as it was in death.

The death, or re-death, of the Skeleton Knight did not go unnoticed. With eerie synchronicity the Skeleton Knight and Skeleton Mage turned to look at Michael before bursting into action. The knight lifted its sword before charging at Michael with a silent roar, its jaw clicking and clacking as it screamed bloody, and completely silent, murder. It managed to get all of eight steps before getting body checked by a bear, the skeleton pinging backwards like a rubber ball.

Michael would have loved to watch Hazel as she – what the? Where did she learn the elbow drop? Michael was momentarily distracted by the sight of a bear wrestling a skeleton but his attention was swiftly brought back by the Skeleton Mages chanting. Unlike the knight which was voiceless, the Mage was currently chanting in a voice like a kid's nightmare, silent yet terrifying. Michael wasn’t hearing the words through something as mundane as his ears, he felt as if the words were impacting his soul.

Michael started this fight wanting to see the full extent of what the skeletons were capable of, but he was rapidly changing his mind. Choosing to end this now rather than find out what the creepy voice had in store, Michael nocked another arrow and infused it with Regeneration. The reason healers were so common here was the inherent weakness the undead had towards healing magic. Regeneration might not have been the most powerful healing spell, especially when speed was required, but an extra kick would be useful. He released the arrow, the glowing projectile speeding through the air to hit the Mage square in the chest with a powerful explosion of magic.

Michael saw none of that, though. Before the arrow left his string, the Skeleton Mage finished its spell. With its final word the mage robbed Michael of his sight, leaving him blind for the next five minutes. Michael would have been worried if it weren’t for the notification telling him of the Mages death.

[Hey Hazel, you done with the knight yet?] Michael asked.

[Almost, why?] Hazel responded, happiness in her voice as she slapped the poor, helpless knight this way and that.

[The Mage managed to blind me and my heal is on cooldown. Want to see if yours works on curses?]

[Seriously? I leave you alone for one second and you go and get yourself cursed. You are such an idiot.]