Chapter 36, Crowded corridors

Picking up the last core I send it into storage before backtracking my way out from the dead end chamber and picking another corridor I haven’t traversed yet. After the corridor I move into another chamber filled with 15 scaly dogs and quickly slice them apart using the ring blade before continuing. The next corridor I walk into is a longer one, about 150 meters, disappearing into a bend towards the left further ahead.

As I walk through it, flickering lanterns and my own glowing eyes giving relief to green moss and smooth, partially cracked gray stone, I think I’m hearing something up ahead. It isn’t before I’ve almost made it to the bend that I’m absolutely sure though. Walking past the bend to the left I come upon a chamber filled with dead monsters. It’s more of the scaly dogs but there’s also an alpha among them.

The blood stains covering the floor and walls seem lacking in their volume and I’m not sure if I’ve just gotten used to seeing more gore than normal with my messy fighting style or if the dungeon has begun restoring the chamber by absorbing the blood.

There’s three corridors leading into this chamber and I’ve come out of one of the two that leads into it while the last one continues towards the floor guardian. I assume as much anyway as the sounds I’ve been hearing are definitely from people fighting a tough battle. Curious, I start walking towards the sounds.

I have to go through another chamber and corridor before I come upon the sight of a party of adventurers struggling to take down the floor guardian. And they’re really struggling with it. A female fire mage is lying on the ground, drinking a healing potion to restore the tear in her chest from 5 sharp claws. The person who must be their front line warrior is struggling to get to his feet with a leg that looks broken as the large male tank covers him.

The floor guardian, biting into the shield of the tank, is a larger variant of the scaly dog alpha but actually has a tail. The tail is also covered in scales and ends in a small ball of bone and scales that probably works great as a bludgeoning instrument. It was most likely the tail that broke the front line warrior’s leg if I had to guess.

A male archer is standing on the leftmost side of the 20 meter wide chamber, firing arrow after arrow against the guardian but barely nicking it through its hard scales. Their female rogue is dodging both her teammate’s arrows and the swishing club of the monster’s tail, trying to get a good strike in. I can see a few small and shallow bleeding cuts on its flank that might have been left there by her. I decide to identify them all both to sate my curiosity and to announce my presence.

[Fire Mage - Level 38]

[Warrior - Level 35]

[Warrior - Level 40]

[Archer - Level 37]

[Rogue - Level 34]

[Scaletail King (Floor guardian) - Level 40]

Every head except for the tank’s, who’s too focused on keeping the guardian from eating his face with his shield, turns my way in an instant. I don’t say anything and merely look at them while standing just outside the chamber. The rogue turns away from me almost immediately and starts dodging the club-like tail while trying to get a cut in and the archer and warrior soon follow suit with continuing what they’d previously been doing.

The fire mage doesn’t look away though and I raise my eyebrow at her in question and she nods while grimacing.

“I guess they really wanted to kill that thing themselves.”

Ari’s probably right and I grunt in agreement before the ring blade flies across the chamber and cuts the guardian in half, the front end hanging attached by its jaws to the tanks shield while the lower half drops to the floor.

Ding! You have slain [Scaletail King (Floor guardian) - Level 40] with the aid of a party. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have cleared the 2nd floor of the Grizklesat dungeon.

The tank keeps wrestling with the dead upper part of the guardian for a few seconds before finally realizing its demise. The eyes of the others follow my ring blade as it quickly zooms back towards me before smoothly stopping to hover behind my back. I step into the chamber and make myself towards the still horizontal fire mage and offer her a hand, feeling her identifying me as she gratefully accepts it.

“Thank you.”

“Sure, no problem.”

My answer is followed by an indignant question from the warrior with a broken bone who has finally managed to get to his feet.

“Why did you steal our kill?!”

“Don’t blame her. She might have saved your sorry ass.”

The fire mage turns her attention back to me after reprimanding her teammate.

“Sorry about him. He’d really been looking forward to fighting this floor guardian today.”

Turning herself back to her party she explains.

“I asked for her help. We might have been able to kill the floor guardian but I didn’t want to risk any of us dying in vain as we don’t have any healing potions left.”

That quickly calms down the rest of the team and they give me looks of gratitude, everyone except the front line warrior that is, as they understand as well as I do that taking any more injuries while fighting the guardian might have resulted in one of them bleeding out even if they managed to kill it.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any healing potions myself so you’ll have to return another day and battle the guardian once more. I’ll be continuing down, take care.”

They nod at me or give a verbal goodbye in response as I walk past them towards the double doors leading into the stairwell heading to the next floor. The doors don’t immediately close behind me but I know they will as soon as the party leaves or if anyone else approaches them without having killed the floor guardian.

The stairwell looks the same as the previous one except for the added decoration of hand sized engravings along the center of the walls. They depict abstract plants and animals in a slightly darker shade of stone indented half a centimeter into the wall, giving them some depth in the flickering yellow light of the lanterns and making them stand out much more. Moss is growing in a few of them and there’s even a small stream of water trickling through a crack running across one depicting an abstract bear.

I continue my way downwards while studying the various designs in interest. They’re quite beautiful in their simplicity and the slightly overgrown and neglected feeling given by the moss and small cracks trickling water only adds to their aura. It makes this place feel older and more important somehow.

Reaching the third floor I inspect my surroundings. The chamber I’ve stepped into has three corridors leading onwards, each 6 meters wide and 3 meters tall. Two of them have turns hiding what’s behind them and the last one has a direct path towards a chamber inhabited by a new type of monster.

I choose the straight corridor leading towards the chamber to get a good look at this new monster. It looks like a scaled badger with a height of 1.5 meters and vicious looking claws reaching 20 centimeters in length. The scales are mostly black with a few white stripes covering its face.

[Armor-plated Badger - Level 30]

I let my ring blade loose and cut the badger in half, being surprised as the badger got knocked to the side with the force of the impact before the spinning blade managed to penetrate the hard scales. It’s a lot tougher than the scaly dogs, that’s for sure.

Continuing towards the next chamber I barely make it 5 meters into the corridor before the ground beneath my feet crumbles. I look down as I’m falling, seeing the meter long wooden spikes scattered along the bottom of the trap 3 meters below me. One spike is exactly beneath me and it’s surrounded by a cluster of spikes tightly packed together. I twist in mid air and manage to avoid getting pierced straight through from beneath but still get cut on my thigh and pierced through the arm by two other spikes.

“Fuck!”

It hurts a bit but isn’t honestly that bad. The cut is shallow and already regenerating and the spike through my arm is easily dislodged by just raising it. I disassemble my ring blade and use telekinesis to whirl the blade sections around me, cutting the spikes into fine splinters before snapping it back together and jumping up on the other side.

“That was our first trap, Zel.”

“Yup. And we walked straight into it.”

“I have a feeling we’ll continue doing just that without being on constant alert for any small changes we can pick up with our sensors. We don’t have a rogue to spot traps after all.”

Ari is right of course but I won’t let it discourage me. Setting off towards the next chamber once again I come upon another badger, this time accompanied by a wriggling plant. The badger lets out a warbling scream before bounding towards me, getting sliced in half by my ring blade meeting it head on. I inspect the plant on the other side of the chamber as it collapses in two pieces 3 meters in front of me.

[Wriggler Thorn Vine - Level 20]

It indeed wriggles all the time and I cut down the 2 meter long, green and wriggling mass of vines with my ring blade before continuing. It’s the same in the next two chambers before the third change occurs. This time there’s two badgers, three wriggler vines and 5 slightly larger scaly dogs.

[Scaled Crusher Canine - Level 25]

Killing them is no more difficult but I do get snagged by one of the wrigglers in a moment of inattentiveness, its thorns tearing small scratches on my thigh. I give that plant monster an extra good dicing as I disassemble the ring blade to cut it into fine mush using all eight blade sections.

Picking up the cores and sending them into storage I see a curious plant I’ve never seen in the dungeon before. It’s lurking in a corner and keeping still like normal plants are supposed to do. I’m ecstatic though as I recognise it from the description of my first gathering posting, the Farilograss. The plant consists of a few blades of lime green grass, 15 centimeters in height and becoming a dark shade of blue on its tips. It’s only one stalk but I’ve barely begun delving and these chambers are surely picked clean of resources on the regular.

“Only 9 more to go, Zel!”

“Yup!”

I meet an ever increasing number of monsters as I continue forwards through the third floor. The wrigglers even start appearing in the corridors and I get ambushed from behind by eight scaly dogs coming from seemingly nowhere when cutting down one wriggler on my path towards the next chamber. I also run across another roaming guardian trundling down a corridor away from my position.

[Reinforced Armor-plated Badger (Roaming Guardian) - Level 45]

It’s still too easy to kill and even though the armor is quite a lot tougher than the normal badgers it still only takes one well placed slice from the ring blade to cut its neck off. I’m about to complain to Ari on how boring this is and ask if we can just run through every chamber towards the floor guardian but I’m distracted by the sounds of clashing metal further up ahead.

Extracting the core with my ring sections and sending it into storage I run towards the sounds of battle, dodging a plant monster's attempt at grabbing me in the corridor. Turning around the bend at the end of the corridor I come upon a chamber with dead scaly dogs, badgers and wrigglier vines. The sounds are coming from further up ahead and I pick one of the four corridors going out from this chamber and move through it.

I come upon another party of adventurers dissecting a chamber of monsters with practiced ease. There’s a female earth mage, male front line warrior, female tank, female healer and a male lightning mage battling against five badgers and eight wriggling vines in a chamber all too small to give them any room to maneuver without taking hits. The healer is working furiously as she tries regenerating all the slashes from badgers and the many thorny vines.

“Move towards me! I’m expending too much mana healing you from this distance!”

The healer shouts to the warrior and tank, making them backtrack from the three badgers they’d been keeping in check. It’s a chaotic battle but the adventurer party looks quite organized in their movements and they continue switching formations to best counteract their disadvantage in numbers.

I decide to not identify them yet and allow them their fun as they seem to have it under control. Distracting them now won’t help anyone. It only takes another minute and a half before the last badger is killed by the warrior and the lightning mage fries the last plant monster with a continuous stream of lightning.

“Good job all. That was quite the difficult challenge this time. This chamber usually only has five plant monsters and four badgers but things are never static in a dungeon. It’s good to be reminded of that sometimes or we might get too comfortable and start taking risks.”

I interrupt her charming after battle speech by clapping my hands and walking out of the corridor I’d been waiting in. They all turn to me and some ready their weapons, relaxing slightly as they identify me, seeing another adventurer and not a new monster. Covered in gore with a spinning ring blade hovering behind my back and walking towards them while smiling does warrant their use of identification I suppose as I don’t present the standard adventurer look.

“That was a most impressive display of teamwork. You said you’ve come this way before?”

I put my question towards the healer as she’d been the one with command during the battle. The healer looks at her teammates with a bit of uncertainty before answering.

“That’s right. This is our fourth delve and we’ve made it to this chamber two times before this. I haven’t seen you around before though, miss?”

“Zelaria. I take it then that the usual crowd has entered the dungeon already then?”

“Um. Yes. They usually move through these floors quickly in one large group, splintering off at the floors appropriate to their levels. We’re probably the last ones still on the third floor.”

That doesn’t sound good. It means that I will continue running into chambers where everything is already dead when I continue delving deeper as long as I’m on floors most of the adventuring crowds occupy.

“Which floors are the most crowded in each delve if you had to say? You must have a general idea by now, no?”

The healer girl thinks for a moment and doesn't manage to answer before the front line warrior speaks up.

“What’s that round thing behind your back?”

I look at him and decide to put on a bit of showmanship as I use my telekinesis to twirl it around a bit before carving through the carcasses of all five badgers in a quick zigzag movement through the room, splattering the walls with more blood in the process. Moving the ring blade still dripping with blood to my back once more I give it a quick spin to dislodge the remaining blood in arcs around me, splattering the ceiling, walls and floor before I return my attention to the wide eyed healer.

“You were saying?”

She works her mouth soundlessly for a short moment before shaking her head slightly and telling me what I want to know.

“Most adventurers occupy floors 5 to 10. It’s where the monsters start reaching level 100 and above, matching most of them in level and difficulty. They usually rush there through the shortest paths each day before killing and then returning in the evenings.”

“Zel, we’ll need to reach floor 11 as soon as possible as it will be really annoying having to walk through chambers already cleared or getting interrupted by another party coming and stealing our foes from us.”

Ari’s take on the matter follows in line with my own thoughts and I decide to speed things up a little by asking the healer one last question.

“Can I see your map?”

I run along the cleared corridors of plant and animal monsters, their carcasses still dripping blood from their injuries or cracked crania where the cores have been extracted. I’m currently on the 9th floor and getting here has only taken me about 7 hours by following the maps I memorized from three different teams of adventurers I met on my way down. The amount of cleared chambers yet to be restored and the number of adventurer parties I’d run in to have steadily been increasing.

I’ve decided to just keep running through the shortest paths, only taking the time to wait for the restoration of the floor guardians before killing them and continuing. The carcasses of the monsters are growing steadily larger and the corridors and chambers wider the further down I go.

This also increases the number of monsters making their way around the different corridors and I get to kill a few of those that wander into my path.

Ding! You have slain [Spiked Armor Badger - Level 52]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Ramming Lizard - Level 58]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Furious Pangolin - Level 64]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Jawed-Tongue Goater - Level 76]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! You have slain [Baltest Shriveler - Level 72]. Less experience awarded.

The dungeon changed a little with each floor I passed through and it now looks quite different than it did in the beginning. The sleek gray stone walls have become a much darker gray with an ever shifting texture going between smooth, rough, bumpy or cracked. The moss is now covering entire patches of floor, wall and ceiling wherever it wants and it’s even joined with smatterings of thick, 1 meter tall grass in some places.

Half hidden pebbles and stones are strewn here and there, making it very annoying to run through as the lighting is only getting worse. The weak and flickering lanterns that hang at fairly regular intervals in the upper floors haven’t increased in number or size with the rest of the dungeon floors or corridors, giving the dungeon larger patches of shadows where anything could be hiding.

This doesn’t really affect me at the moment as my golden eyes are blazing and showing me a clear view of everything. When the chamber and corridor sizes eclipse my range of visibility of 80 meters it will start becoming a problem but it will also make it more exciting.

The abstract designs of animals and plants have become larger and gained more depth, looking almost life-like as the flickering lanterns make them dance in the darkness. There’s even been a few statues of combined beasts with scales.

A scaled deer with a bear head and a scorpion's tail, a scaled bird with tiny snakes for talons and razor sharp looking teeth in a round maw instead of a beak and many more creatures such as these. I haven’t seen a statue depicting anything I’ve killed and I’m not sure if these statues depict monsters on the lower floors or not.

I run into another party of adventurers as I turn a corner in the corridor, nearly toppling one of them carrying a magical light before uttering a hurried apology and continuing my dash. I’ve started running into returning adventurers more and more frequently the further down I go as most of them want to return all the way up on the same day. It’s lunacy to walk down and up like that but I’m not going to force them to delve more efficiently. Them taking breaks only gives me more space after all.

Another [Baltest Shriveler] crosses into my corridor from a junction and I let my ring blade zoom ahead of me and decapitate it. The creature looks like some sort of humanoid cat thing running on all fours with scales and tentacles instead of a tail that sucks all the moisture out of anything they latch onto. I actually came upon a group of adventurers who’d turned into nothing more than dried out husks half an hour ago, nasty way to go. I’d picked up their storage rings and stored their adventurer tokens, transferring their combined 70 silver coins to my own ring before throwing them away.

The shrivel cat’s head falls towards the ground before landing and getting torn open by the blade sections, finishing the core extraction just as I catch up to it and pluck the core from the brain matter and send it to storage. My ring blade assembles itself before floating to my back and I’m off once more.

The next chamber I enter has 2 different exits going in opposite directions and I follow the one still coated in dead monsters, slowly disappearing, and am pleasantly surprised as the corridor leads into a chamber that’s already been restored and repopulated.

“Do you think that party we met back there is the last group to move towards the surface after one day of delving? If so then we should have restored chambers in front of us all the way to the 9th floor guardian.”

“Sure hope so, Ari. I’m getting bored just running through empty halls of stone.”

The chamber is filled with monsters of 3 varieties. There’s the Baltest Shrivelers, Jawed-tongue Goaters, Furious Pangolins and the obnoxious plant monsters interspersed randomly through the chamber, hidden in grass or skulking behind beasts. There’s about 40 monsters in total and they’re the first to charge.

Each of these monsters are in the 60-80 level range and my ring blade leaves my back to carve a bloody path through them. I’m getting better and better at controlling it in the assembled form and I’ve now started doing it while wielding my daggers.

I meet the charge of a rolling pangolin and jump straight over it to skewer a Goater behind it. The Furious Pangolins are about 1.5 meters in height in their ball-form and roll really fast, seeming to bounce off walls and never losing speed. The Jawed-tongue Goaters on the other hand are scaly, dark brown goats without horns and a long and wide split tongue with teeth running along the insides. Their square pupils glow a dim, sinister red while their hooves have human looking skeletal toes attached to them.

It looks disgusting and I’m quite happy to pierce it through the brain on landing. I turn to cut down another goater who’s preparing to clamp its tongue around me while the ring blade zooms past my back, cutting another Baltest Shriveler that tried ambushing me from a perceived blind spot in half.

I stab, slash, tear and kick with my daggers and legs as the ring blade tears through the chamber and cuts down anything out of my daggers’ reach or anything coming for my weak spots. I take a few hits and slices from claws and thorns and I’m definitely not fighting very effectively with my daggers, having my focus split as it is. The [Sensors] skill is really making this easier though as I can focus in on different areas with multitasking and use that sharpened information for guiding my ring blade, allowing me to keep my own eyes focused on the opponents I’m engaging in melee.

I focus my ring blade primarily on taking out any plant monsters trying to ensnare me, running it across the ground in a vertical position and cutting both vines and beasts in half as its spinning edge tears through fibers, muscle, sinew and bone. Kicking out with my right foot and connecting it with a humanoid tentacle cat I send it into the path of my passing ring blade, cleaving it in half, while simultaneously disconnecting the split tongue of a Jawed-tongue Goater from its face with my left dagger.

I take a few more hits as they keep piling on to me but I manage to either move my ring blade to cover the weakness or move the enemy into my ring blade in most cases. I’m getting better at using it all the time and it's taking less focus the longer I’m fighting like this. The ring blade has almost started feeling like a new limb by the end of it as I kick the last Furious Pangolin hard enough to break its scales, uncurling it slightly and moving the ring blade into the uncovered weak spot at lightning speed. It severs the pangolin’s spine, tearing through its back before turning in an arc overhead and slicing its head off like a guillotine on its way down, stopping just before hitting the floor.

I kick the last monster in the chamber, a Baltest Shriveler in the head and splatter its brains all over the carcasses around me before turning my full attention to the hovering ring blade, located between the severed neck and head of the pangolin. Using my will I manipulate the arcane mana structure connecting to the kinetic mana of the external module to make it move towards me.

There’s definitely a difference between how easily it responds to my thoughts now than before this fight. I manipulate it to spin a little faster and it splatters the remaining blood in a thin line across the whole chamber, becoming spotless in an instant. Cutting the power keeping the ring blade assembled I use telekinesis to carve up the carcasses and flick out the monster cores from their brains and in my general direction.

Manipulating the kinetic mana of 8 different modules is still quite difficult and I’m sure I’ll need a lot more training and higher skill levels before I can do it simultaneously while fighting with my daggers. I’ll have to stick to just using the assembled ring blade when fighting for now until my proficiency rises to acceptable levels. I can train using the blade sections at every other moment though and I decide to keep them disassembled, only assembling them when going into battle, to get used to them quicker.

“We should check our notifications now, Zel. We’ve created a new esoteric arcane weapon and started incorporating it into our fighting style and that will surely have had a great impact on our skill levels.”

“Sure, let’s check how much we’ve grown since leaving the capital.”

Ding! You have slain [White Thorn Lily - Level 5]. Less experience awarded.

…

Ding! You have slain [Warrior - Level 240]. Less experience awarded.

Ding! [Mana Machine v. 2.3] has leveled from [180] to [188]. +[80 AP].

Ding! General skill [Identify] has leveled from [46] to [50].

Ding! General skill [Aerial Acrobatics] has leveled from [68] to [73].

Ding! General skill [Running] has leveled from [97] to [108].

Ding! General skill [Sprinting] has leveled from [101] to [112].

Ding! General skill [Jumping] has leveled from [132] to [138].

Ding! General skill [Dodging] has leveled from [212] to [221].

Ding! General skill [Harvesting] has leveled from [8] to [11].

Ding! General skill [Small Blades] has leveled from [168] to [174].

Ding! General skill [Dual Wielding] has leveled from [192] to [200].

Ding! General skill [Unarmed] has leveled from [102] to [113].

Ding! General skill [Arcane Spatial Ring] has leveled from [98] to [116].

Ding! General skill [Basic Arcane Telekinesis] has leveled from [146] to [195].

Ding! Skill [Sensors] has leveled from [233] to [255].

Ding! Skill [Passive Power] has leveled from [504] to [529].

Ding! Skill [Arcane Manipulation] has leveled from [528] to [557].

Ding! Skill [Capacitor] has leveled from [301] to [336].

Ding! Skill [External Modules] has leveled from [188] to [226].

Ding! Skill [Power Profiler] has leveled from [1] to [64].

Ding! Resistance [Poison Resistance] has increased from [8] to [10].

Ding! General skill [Identify] has evolved.

[Identify]

Skill for identifying creatures and objects. If Skill Level is too low only creature and object names will be provided. Identify the level of all creatures below level [Your level + Skill Level]. Approximation will be provided if the target is outside the limit. Name of highest leveled class provided if target is inside the limit.

‘?’ = Limit + [0~25]

‘??’ = Limit + [25~100]

‘???’ = Limit + [100~500]

‘????’ = Limit + [500~1000]

“A skill evolution?! From reaching level 50 or what?”

“Yes, that seems to be the case, Zel. It’s a good addition, I had no idea that people with [Identify] above level 50 were able to see our class name whenever they identified us. I suppose it isn’t common to discuss it though as it’s probably seen as private. Quite a few skill levels on the skills related to the ring blade as well. It seems to be working as we hoped it would.”

“Indeed. Where do we place our 80 AP, Ari?”

“We continue putting them into wisdom I think. Our regeneration will most likely matter the most if this dungeon keeps increasing the amount of monsters as we go deeper.”

“Alright.”

Ding! Attribute [Wisdom] has been increased from [710] to [790].

Attribute Points: [0]

Strength: [110] -50%

Constitution: [110] -50%

Vitality: [110] -50%

Agility: [110] -50%

Dexterity: [110] -50%

Intelligence: [163] +300%

Wisdom: [790] +295%

Mana: [6520 / 6520]

Capacitor: [20,123 / 21,907]

Mana regen: [3120] / Minute

I pick up the last of the cores before moving the blade sections to my back, keeping them seperate but still in the general shape of a ring, giving me ample practice in keeping them steady while slowly rotating. Stepping over a carcass and plucking my 5th stalk of Farilograss I continue towards the 9th floor guardian.