Chapter 169 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

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Vacation over time for regular schedule to continue :)

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Pov Vinny

It was already the second day since we started to camp at this particular way station. Everyone else had already left to run errands, so I was currently the only one present in this way station. I remember being annoyed, but that was a day ago. I have changed my mind now. It's so peaceful here, and it's quite a nice atmosphere. Perhaps some calm would be nice.

Hours continued to pass. When I decided to open one of the many magic books that I had purchased. My stay here became truly nice. Kicking my feet up onto a rock while laying down on this wonderful chair Ziiipe made, and being close to the campfire, is something that I might want to replicate more often.

Finding the magic books that I’m interested in is quite hard. I still remember when it came as a surprise to me that a lot of adventurers didn't consider you a mage if you only used skills. This book is one of those that teaches you to use real magic. While there are skills to help you make this job easier, real magic is truly versatile but also quite difficult to master.

A fireball skill—you just need to think about it, channel your mana like with every skill, and you can throw fireballs like those pyromaniacs. They are an interesting breed of adventurer, believing that every problem can be solved with a fireball.

While I wouldn’t say that every problem could be solved like that, the number of problems that can is extremely high. Although, I would like for them to be a little bit less excited whenever they get the chance to make something burn.

To cast a fireball without using a skill—now that takes some doing. Not only do you need to actually control your mana, not just channel it, as you don’t actually have a place to channel it to. No, you need to control it, project it, and then shape it into specific symbols or runes. It seems that no one can actually agree on what to call them.

When that is done, you then need to use your willpower to actually make it do anything, and only then will you be able to cast a fireball that will most likely miss because you would actually need to practice aiming.

Not to say that with a skill you wouldn’t need to practice, but it’s just so simplified and so much easier when you could just use a skill. Thanks to Ziiipe, I have been able to understand that skills are just a convenient package for all the actions you would need to take to cast a real spell.

That has brought up some questions as to what skills actually are, yet trying to find information about that is turning out to be harder than I expected.

I took out a large notebook in which Ziiipe has scribbled down some of the symbols from a few skills that would be quite useful to have, but they are simply not important enough to dedicate a skill slot for.

I have only been able to get one of them to work, but it's only a matter of time before I can properly start to add them to my spellbook, which will improve our party's capabilities to survive what this dungeon can throw at us.

About an hour later, I was interrupted by the gateway opening. I readied myself to fight, but then I saw who came through it. "Vinny?" she yelled as she sprinted towards me.

"Big news! A new hub station has been discovered. It's quite a weird one. Caspian and Carly have called us. We will be going with a speedrunners group to reach this new place." Ziiipe was excited as always, and even before I was able to stand up, she had already started packing away our gear.

I started to do the same. "That is weird. Why now? There already was a hub station. I didn’t expect one to be found so fast. What makes this one weird?" I was barely able to get my question out when she already started to answer.

"Not much is known, but apparently there is a huge area like in any hub station, but there are no ways forward besides a huge desert. Some scout was able to estimate that the other side, and presumably the way forward, is about 5000 kilometers away."

"What?" I said in complete confusion. Then I noticed how she was looking at me. "It's not nice to make jokes about serious things." She laughed while shaking her head. "I wasn't making a joke, just enjoying your disbelief. Don’t worry, I went through the same stages."

She continued to laugh while packing up the last of the things. Damn, she’s so fast at that, but it's so far to travel in a desert. No flying skill was going to take you to the other side, not at our rank. "It's going to be a long and rough journey to get to the other side."

She got more serious as she noted, "There will most likely need to be caravans, as I do not believe it to be a safe place. We don't know much more, as only one scout made it there, and he decided not to stay there just in case something might happen to him."

"Wait, wait, wait, something happened to him? Isn't it a hub station?" She finished putting the last thing into her seemingly endless backpack and then answered, "There were regular creatures in the safe area, but he reported seeing a huge snake swimming in the sand, and it looked deadly to his senses."

That made me swallow. A snake would need to be able to control sand to be able to swim in it. Being in an environment that a monster had such control over was beyond dangerous. "It is definitely a milestone of some sort. The dungeon would not make something so different for it to be an insignificant development." She just shrugged her shoulders. "Let's go, we don't have much time."

We entered the gateway that took us to a hub station. We weren’t the only ones rushing towards a particular tunnel, as there was already quite a large group gathered there. "We will be leaving in 10 minutes. If you can't keep up, you will not be waited on. This is the 10-minute warning," someone was yelling in a loud voice. There must have been a few hundred people here preparing for a long and hard march.

We noticed Carl and quickly joined him. "You made it! Good. Caspian and Sandy are bringing the last of our supplies; they should be here in a few minutes. I hope you guys are ready; this will not be an easy task. We have a lot of ground to cover, but at least we have a pathway to this strange room," Carl said as a greeting. The rest of the time, I prepared and cast some spells to make this easier.

There was currently only one pathway known, and most likely there would be an easier way in the future, but currently, we would need to travel almost 1000 kilometers through the many different rooms and tunnels.

The pace would almost be that of a sprint for a normal human. It will not be a nice journey, but even I believe that this is something significant, and being there first was probably a good idea.

The days blurred together, and every time there was a rest break, everyone slept as we simply needed it. Of course, Carl was doing the best as his runs made him a lot better at these kinds of situations.

He was even one of the ones who periodically went to the front to kill the monsters ahead of us. In this group, there were not only fighters but also people who were good at making stuff. As we also needed to make a settlement in this new room.

There was no time to do absolutely anything else, but thankfully this grueling march was over in less than a month. We have already gotten some reports of an easier path that cut our travel distance by over 200 kilometers, but it took them about the same amount of time to find that shortcut as it took us to reach this room.

We are now only a few minutes away. "It better have been worth this torment," I said out loud and got grunts of approval not just from my party but everyone else around us as well.