Hello! here is the beginning of the chapter 14, to give you an small idea of the skills and mentality of the chars.

It's short, but it's the one part of the chapter that I know won't be changing, so here it is.

Enjoy! (I hope)

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Chapter 14 (teaser)

The 5 stooges had registered as a party. They were ready, and after reaching the entrance of the underground dungeon, they prepared to enter it.

It was a sort of big hole in the ground, which made it at least a lvl 200 instance…. or so had told them Kifirin, the resident bookworm. It was part of the miscellaneous knowledge she had gained of the game that didn’t rate for a knowledge sheet.

Underground dungeons were level 200 minimum (caves were the exception to the rule and could be whatever).

……

Bluebell went first, but was very careful. He couldn’t see the ground after Ankara sent a huge fireball down there. In fact, he just saw the light getting dimmer as it went farther… so he had no idea of the pit’s depths.

He had also sent a minor ‘sound wave’ by using a telekinetic subskill that vibrated air molecules at a very high frequency, but got nothing back. It meant that the ground was farthest than his telekinesis AoE. Not reassuring… Buffed as he was, his range was 30 meters, which would already make for a deadly drop.

So yeah… he went in cautiously.

He also made an educated guess for the benefit of the party: “You guys probably already know it but…. it’s pretty deep. Maybe extremly so. We have no way of knowing so don’t just jump in”

As he began to drop, he used telekinesis yet again to agitate the molecules of the air under him in a researched way, rearranging, compressing and cooling them as he saw fit. The density of the air went up, which slowed down his fall. A lot.

Mightily liking this new application of molecular telekinesis, he registered it as a subskill named ‘Density rule’, making sure he could select the parameters before and during use, which would allow him to customize his altering of the air density.

Wanna slow foes…. Immobilize them? Easy as pie. Make them choke on air? Simple. Make a sort of barrier? A bit more complicated because he would have to add adapted space variables to the calculation, but overall achievable.

His mind full of equations and possible uses of this new subskill, he smiled broadly. Regardless of its ending, this trip would not be a waste. He had already gained much from it.

Hmm? The mathematics? Well, he was obviously doing them all in the middle of said drop.

Talk about a cool cucumber. A SMART cucumber. He could also have teleported in loops but it wouldn’t have been challenging then, would it?

……

Lennart hopped in without a care in the world. Well, he used slow first, but he knew it wasn’t gonna help that much thanks to his first-hand experience at the papal mass. He didn’t care though, he knew he wouldn’t die from it, his defense and vitality were outta the lock.

It would still hurt though.

But damn, it was so FUN! The thrill of jumping into the unknown, aware of the fact that he’d crash at the end…. Wonderful! Adrenaline, here he came! (Pain too, but well...)

…..

Ankara dubiously watched the paladin commit virtual suicide. For the life of her she couldn’t understand why he had declined her help. *Whatever… guys!*

She activated flight and rushed down. She didn’t know how far was the ground, so she had decided to be quick. She didn’t want to run out of mana halfway after all… no time for sightseeing.

She also created a mana flare on the way. It’d be too bad if she went splat at the very end because she had blindly rushed headlong into the impenetrable ground.

…..

Vyx drank some ‘Elixir #23’. It was a consumable so he had mixed it using mana, which had been painstakingly long because of its brewing process. However, the rewards were great and he had made quite a lot of it.

The beverage allowed the one who drank it to totally ignore the first damage received after ingestion, be it the slap of a vexed maiden, or the flame of a dragon. Obviously it couldn’t be used too much unless one wanted to suffer from an excruciatingly painful poisoned status, but it could be useful in tight spots.

This was one such occasion. Hopefully he wouldn’t get scratched by something on the way, because then he would be pretty much fucked. Then again, he worked well under pressure…

Indeed, the whiz still had many aces up his sleeves.

He just wanted to test his last creation…

….

Kifirin painfully watched Vyx gulp down a glowing white substance that had a gooey consistency. She wondered how it was supposed to save his ass…. and it seemed disgusting.

Looking down at the hell-hole, she did the leap of faith, and then blinked down. Over and over again, she blinked down. Obviously, there was a 5 seconds cooldown between each leap during which she used the air element to slow her fall.

It was a great exercise of concentration, precisely alternating spells like this on a set timing. If she miscalculated by even a hundredth of a second, she might die.

It was fun though. She loved the feeling of her stomach dropping again and again after each blink when gravity claimed her.

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At the entrance of the burial maze, a blue-haired guy could be seen approaching from above. It may have been dark, but he felt the ground coming thanks to his permanent sound-waves releases. Prepared for the imminent landing, he altered the variables of ‘Density rule’ yet again. YET AGAIN, yes, because the fall had lasted more or less 5 minutes… so he had started playing around with his new toy when he got bored.

The dungeon was frighteningly deep.

Blue’s ever-changing speed went from fast to super slow in the matter of seconds, and as his feet gently touched the ground, he smoothed his hairs back and tied them down. They had been obstructing his field of vision, flowing around as they were.

The walls where then illuminated as the torches they held all lighted up at the same time. Spooky.

Not long after, a free-falling nutcase whooped loudly as he finally saw his final destination. The adrenaline high was glorious… he was approaching the ground extremly fast.

Then he crashed with a metallic crunch. The armor equipped above the jumpsuit had shattered into smithereens, but he didn’t seem to be in that bad a state. He should have looked like a wet stain on the ground after all, so what were a few broken bones? Internal bleedings too, but at this point it was hardly worth mentioning.

It looked painful.

He was soon followed by a screeching witch flying at a terrifying speed. She was so fast that she simply couldn’t stop on time and had to correct her route in-extremis. Making a sharp-angle riiiiight above the welcoming ground, she unwillingly maintained the now horizontal course and was uncontrollably hurled into a nearby tunnel, missing the wall by a short distance.

That’s when she left the guy’s sight. She hadn’t stopped screaming for dear life and the volume went down as she got farther away. The passageway then closed behind her.

Blue gaped.

The fallen Lennart guffawed, almost spitting out his health potion in the process.

A bit later, Vyx violently collided into the ground in a messy tangle of limbs. He then elegantly got up and dusted himself as if nothing had happened, looking perfectly fine. Even his clothes were spotless, so the dusting has been quite superfluous.

In the middle of trying to sit up, Lennart gave him the stink eye. His broken body wasn’t really collaborating, so it looked quite pitiful.

Right then, Kifirin appeared on the ground. She had blinked. When she raised an eyebrow in questioning of Ankara not being at point B even though she left point A before her, Blue said they'd lost her.

[The rest will be posted at a later date]