Respawn time set to 30 minutes due to prison. 500 exp lost due to the set loss rate of the dungeon.

Dan couldn’t believe it, that abyssal ice mage had it out for him for whatever reason. There wasn’t much he could do right there, and one more death in the dungeon would set him back to level one completely undoing any accomplishments he had made while completing his last quest. Well he would be ready next time the ice mage came. When he stepped out of the respawn portal he would cast his Death Missile and nail the sucker right in between his eyes. Although he did have another twenty eight minutes until respawn. Not knowing what else to do he opened the few notifications he had left and sat down.

Decomposing Mist Increased to Novice IV! - Keep using this and you might find a bonus inside the creatures you’re melting! Just reach right in!

You have gained the title: Rogue Mage. This is a mandatory title and cannot be removed.

Your Deity is pleased with your progress and has granted you a boon!

Skill learned (Pray I) - Pray for your life or sanity, there is a chance that your prayer will be answered by your deity. Can only be used once per day.

Due to your efforts to improve your magical abilities you have gained +1 intelligence.

Not awful gains. He just needed to actually gain the levels to put them to use. He wondered how long he would be in here. If he kept dying in here he might never gain the levels necessary to actually make it through the second door even if his idea to take items from the room and stash them away worked. Wait… if he was kept at a lower level then he was never going to be able to escape… or at least he thought that was the logic of the Mage’s College. Is that why the ice mage was sent to kill them? It would make sense why his fellow prison companion was still so low level she couldn’t get through the dungeon.

In that case it might be best he didn’t rock the boat, he’d need to suck up his pride or they might be punished further if he resisted. Dan sighed and instead of planning his revenge against the killing Dan spent his time planning on how to get through the dungeon.

Finally the last of the thirty minutes passed and Dan stepped out of the respawn portal and was greeted by the grinning face of the ice mage. He wasn’t attacking him and seemed surprised as Dan just stood there. “What? You’re not going to attack me and further your punishment? Who knows, you may even succeed?” He said with an evil grin as he moved his hands out to the side as if surrendering.

“No, I’m not interested in attacking you, though I am interested to know why they sent a student down here instead of someone with more authority.”

The mage laughed at him for a moment before his face started sneering once again and he began to rotate a ball of ice in his hand like he did when they had first met. “Authority? There’s no chain of authority needed to kill prisoners. You just need to sign up for live target training. You can level your skills so much faster with actual targets rather than training dummies or even sparring. It’s also meant to be a lesson to get over squeamishness which does not befit a mage, though I have no issues with that. Though if you don’t wish to put up a modicum of resistance then I suppose I’ll just need to kill you now.”

With that said he raised his left hand, which was holding the ball of ice, to his mouth and gently blew over the ball, causing shards to sprout from the shifting mass and pierce Dan, killing him instantly and sending him to respawn where he lost all his experience.

“At this point I’m going to spend more time with no experience points at all than I will with at least a few.” Dan said into the void of his respawn room. With nothing else to do he decided to at least go to sleep, so he curled up on the ground and was out in less than a minute after a stressful day. His sleep didn’t last long however as he was suddenly thrown out of the respawn room and into the dungeon.

Due to dungeon settings you may not stay in the respawn room for more than 35 minutes.

Dan sighed as he looked around, noticing the woman asleep on the floor and the ice mage gone having taken all their experience away. Leaving her to sleep he walked back to the dungeon and peeking through the first door he saw the Swan they had killed had respawned and was back on its pedestal. Dan decided to leave it until morning, but vowed to start early the next day, he had to try a few things before committing to getting the key. So he hunkered down on the freezing floor and did his best to sleep in the much less comfortable environment.

Much sooner than he was hoping he was woken up by a slippered foot hitting his side, doing a point of damage, and him being forced to his feet by the woman. “Get up, if you’re going to stay here with me then you better pull your weight.”

“Wait, at least tell me your name before we go back in!” Dan shot back at her, as she gave a sigh and looked back at him and towards the dungeon before finally deciding she had time to talk. “My name is Lashandra. And what’s your name?”

“Dan, nice to actually meet you. Now I have an idea, I want to get out of here just as badly as you do so I wanted to try a few things to get us ahead. Also I have a few questions. Can you take the key to the eastern door out of the western one then? I assumed you managed to open the eastern door that first time.”

She nodded her head but didn’t elaborate. “Good that means that things can leave the room, so that means my idea has some merit. Secondly, do they come to kill us every night?”

“They’ll do it earlier sometimes, just like yesterday, but mostly it is at the end of every night. They’ve yet to miss a day at least. And before you ask, we don’t get food. Dying resets the hunger debuff you can get, so they don’t bother feeding us. Now if you’re done with your twenty questions let's get going.”

Dan had a few more questions but decided to shelve them at her impatience. She led them into the dungeon and before they could approach the swan Dan held out his hand. “Hold on, I have something that might make this easier.” Dan then activated his Summon Thrall spell using over a third of his precious mana points.

From the icy ground a quivering paw shot up, thankfully the skin seemed to be gone instead of rotting off as it began to pull itself from the ground, the rabbit’s large skeleton managed to wriggle its way from the hole which sealed up behind it. Lashandra walked up to the oversized rabbit and began to circle around it, taking into account its skeletal exterior.

“Seems like a good tank for us at least. Why a rabbit though? It seems like most other animals would have been a better idea.” Dan ignored the question, and directed the rabbit forward to attack the swan. When the rabbit came into range of it, the swan began to attack it, trying to peck through its bones, though with the Raile’s speed it had a hard time hitting the bones and continually hit in between the bones. Casting Decomposing mist on the swan he used up another chunk of his mana leaving with just enough to use a Death Missile on the swan. He really needed to increase his mana. Luckily that plus Lashandra’s Seed Bullets were enough to kill the swan. As it died a pair of swan shaped earrings on a hoop fell to the ground.

“Wait, what about the Swan Staff? Why didn’t it drop?” Dan asked in confusion. He had really been banking on that dropping for his plan.

“It’s a much more rare drop, the swan usually drops earrings like this or other jewelry.” Lashandra began to make her way over to pick up the earrings before Dan stopped her. Gesturing at his thrall he ordered it to pick up the earrings in its jaw, and led the indifferent zombie skeleton and confused woman to the door. As Dan passed through the door he had the zombie follow right after and Lashandra passed through after that. She rolled her eyes at the waste of time until she looked at the rabbit and her jaw dropped as she saw the earrings still in its jaw despite having passed through the doorway that took the staff from Dan last night.

“You’re telling me if we have summons pick up the items then they pass through the door? That’s so simple… but it makes so much sense. They’re probably not listed on what to take loot from! We can finally start to make our way out! If we can gather enough loot then maybe we can make up for our lack of levels! We need more! Oh god! But well… we also need to gather enough to appease them. And won’t they just disappear if we wear the gear back in?”

“Woah, woah, woah, calm down for a moment. I have no clue to, well… like anything you just asked. This was just a hunch I had. I assume anything we wear into the dungeon we get to keep since neither of our outfits have disappeared. We’ll need to be careful though since if they notice us wearing extra gear in the jail cell they’ll know something is up. Let’s just take this one step at a time and clear the dungeon for today. Try going in there wearing the earrings though, we’ll see if you get to keep them.”

Lashandra took the earrings from Dan’s thrall and put them on. Nodding to him she stepped through and kept her earrings. She then quickly stepped out and they jingled as they swayed under her ears. She touched them both and ran back into the room, finally closer to escaping her prison than she had been since she had arrived.